An innocent husband, or an accomplice, or even a victim?
Alan Crellin was a tragic character of a Gillian Flynn novel, Sharp Objects, whose wife, suffering from Munchausen by proxy syndrome, a rare mental illness, had poisoned their eldest daughter and had been poisoning their little daughter, whose stepdaughter was a cutter and had once cut words all over her own skin, and whose little daughter, though surviving her mother’s poisoning, murdered three playmates of her own. Alan’s past was shrouded in mystery. He married a girl with a bastard and moved to live with her in a small town, Wind Gap. It’s said that he was once a ribbon-winning equestrian, but he didn’t ride anymore because it made his wife nervous, and incredibly, from then on he’s often ill, and even when he’s not, he’s mostly immobile. He communicated with nobody but his wife and even with his wife he seemed content to let her do most of the talking. He’s smooth and shallow as glass. When his wife was arrested for murders, he immediately paid the punishing bail sum so that she could await trail in the comfort of her home. And when she was put in prison, he took an apartment near her prison and wrote letters to her on days he couldn’t visit. By contrast, he seemed not to care whether his daughters lived or died. While he shut down the Wind Gap house and moved to live near his jailed wife, he left his sickly little girl with his stepdaughter who once cut herself. There’s indeed a bit of a mystery about Alan, however, if he was considered a victim as well the mystery would be easily explained. Firstly, in my opinion, he was a victim of marriage. He married at his parents’ will. Secondly, he was a victim of his wife’s poisoning. It’s the reason why he’s often ill after his marriage. Thirdly, he was a victim of immature mind. As a boy he clung to his parents and after getting married he clung to his wife, even though she poisoned him and their daughters. Maybe, the family of his parents was nuclear, and his was toxic.