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Amy Adams hunts a local killer in Sharp Objects.

“DEAD GIRLS EVERYWHERE,” laments a character in HBO’s smalltown mystery Sharp Objects. She’s talking about more than the preteen bodies found piling up in Wind Gap, Missouri, where hometown gal Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) has returned to write a story for her St. Louis newspaper and come to terms with her haunted past. Based on the terse and haunting debut novel by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), this eight-episode series is in part about the spirit-killing exploitation, manipulation, and negative messages that drive women of all ages, classes, and races to hurt themselves and other women. (Camille is a cutter whose body is inscribed with so many messages that when she goes out in public, only tiny slivers of skin are exposed.) And yet Sharp Objects embeds its cultural observations so deep in the fabric of its story that it never feels like a message delivery device that just happens to have characters and a plot. And, much like David Fincher’s gory black-comedy movie adaptation of Gone Girl, its ultimate resolution will likely have critics arguing about whether it’s part of the problem or the solution.