Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” was voted the best thriller of the 21st century in our recent poll. If you haven’t read it yet, you can start right here: We’re going to be looking at only the first three paragraphs, without giving away any secrets. And if you have read the book, it’s worth marveling at how Flynn grabs your attention and gives you the willies.

Not by revealing very much. A chapter heading states that the narrator is someone named Nick Dunne. We don’t know who this Nick is or what he’s like, and he’s not in a hurry to tell us. Here’s how he introduces himself in the opening passage:

When you think of your favorite thriller, you always think of the beginning.

Some writers plunge you right into the middle of the action, peppering you with names, places and vivid details.

Here’s Dan Brown, kicking off “Angels & Demons”: “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.”

And here’s the beginning of Attica Locke’s “The Cutting Season”: “It was during the Thompson-Delacroix wedding, Caren’s first week on the job, that a cottonmouth, measuring the length of a Cadillac, fell some 20 feet from a live oak on the front lawn, landing like a coil of rope in the lap of the bride’s future mother-in-law.”

But other, equally masterly thrillers ensnare you in a butterfly net of indirection and innuendo, creating a mood of uneasy suspense without supplying much concrete information. That’s Flynn’s M.O.

It works in movies too, though not exactly the same way. In her screenplay for the 2014 film adaptation of “Gone Girl,” directed by David Fincher, Flynn condensed the opening lines and emphasized the violence of Nick’s thoughts. In Ben Affleck’s tobacco-rasped baritone, he says he pictures “cracking her lovely skull” while the camera gazes upon Rosamund Pike’s blond, unblemished cranium. We’re not so much in his mind as in their bed.

Movies, even psychological thrillers as deft and atmospheric as “Gone Girl,” take place in literal, visual space. Fincher’s opening shots supply important facts about the characters and the setting, a stressed-out industrial town in the middle of the Great Recession. True to its source, the movie is full of twists and surprises. It’s cold, scary and sometimes appallingly funny.

The novel shares those qualities, but it also operates in a more intimate, human register. The story is anchored in the consciousness of its characters; we see it all through the fog of their desires, dreams and delusions. They’re smart people who make dubious, sometimes disastrous choices.

We start out with Nick’s version of things. Later, we’ll hear from Amy, gaining the kind of access to her mind that her husband can only fantasize about. The maelstrom of their marriage, once the stormclouds burst, is a classic and convoluted he said/she said story.

The key to the novel’s power lies less in what they say than in how they say it — as if they are confiding in us, telling deeply held secrets, trusting us to be on their side, or at least to hear them out.

In those first pages, you can almost feel Nick’s hand on your shoulder as he muses on the mysteries of his wife’s skull. In real life, you might be plotting your escape, nodding politely and stepping away. “Gone Girl” reverses that magnetism. What should repel you draws you nearer. The book gets into your head, and under your skin.

Among the many complaints made about the modern American novelist, the loudest, if not the most intelligent, has been the charge that he is not speaking for his country. A few seasons back an editorial in Life magazine asked grandly, “Who speaks for America today?” and was not able to conclude that our novelists, or at least our most gifted ones, did.

This opening paragraph is from an essay titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country” by a writer whose work was influenced by Catholicism, the rural South and peacocks. Who was it?