"To start: I should never have been born": The antiheroine as stranger in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects and Gone Girl

As two figures that exist on the margins of society and culture, the antiheroine and the stranger are uncannily alike in their boundary-crossing and liminal occupation of physical and metaphorical spaces. Gillian Flynn is renowned for her unflinching characterization of complex, disturbing, and abject characters who simultaneously transcend and problematize traditional stereotypes surrounding abject female deviancy, manipulation, and the evocation of violence. In the narratives examined here, the stranger manifests by way of Flynn's liminal antiheroines, thus resulting in the repetition of cyclical patterns of violence, social expulsion, and identity crises. These antiheroines--Camille Preaker from Sharp Objects (2007) and Amy Elliott Dunne from Gone Girl (2013)--are strange both to themselves and to others, and this strangeness is highlighted by their occupation of physical in-between places and spaces--i.e., bars, cars, hotels and parks--and by their obsession with the borderlines of life and death, real and unreal, known and unknown. Here, the nature of strangeness as a symptom or consequence of antiheroism, thus rendering the antiheroines in these texts doubly liminal and abject, is conceptualized.