Gillian Flynn has a knack for twisting the knife, usually before you even know you’ve been stabbed. In Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects, she spins a web, adorning it with broken characters and insidious atmosphere, before pumping you full of venom with the lethal bite of her pen.
What’s even scarier? She can do the same thing with far fewer pages at her disposal. The Grownup, her new novella, puts the Flynn spin on the old-fashioned ghost story, beginning, in typical fashion, by making you fall for a character you have no reason to like: an unnamed narrator whose bitter past has led her to her present occupations as a carpal tunnel-plagued sex worker and fake psychic. She’s a canny one, damaged but resilient, and her intelligence and world-weariness make her sordid tale jump off the page.
It wouldn’t be a Flynn story without a mystery, which walks through the door in the guise of Susan, a customer who seems less in need of a reading than a complete reinvention: she’s living in an “evil” new house, and her stepson is worrying her. Sensing an easy mark, our narrator puts her psychic abilities at Susan’s disposal. But it soon becomes clear this damaged heroine may have bitten off more than she can chew. You’ll encounter more than one mega plot twist before you reach the final page. Who can you trust? I’d say the cat’s your only safe bet, but I’m not even 100 percent sure about that.
This story was originally published under a different name in an anthology that included work by fantasy fiction powerhouses like Neil Gaiman and Patrick Rothfuss, but there’s more phantasmagoric than phantom here, and that’s to its credit. Flynn, better than most, can start you on one path only to send you hurtling in the other direction with breakneck speed. Packaged on its own, The Grownup has room to breathe, and to show us an author who knows her wheelhouse and owns it.
