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Title: The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
Details: Copyright 2014, Penguin Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "GILLIAN FLYNN'S EDGAR AWARD-WINNING HOMAGE TO THE CLASSIC GHOST STORY, PUBLISHED FOR THE FIRST TIME AS A STANDALONE.
A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the "psychic" visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan’s terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore. Miles, Susan’s teenage stepson, doesn’t help matters with his disturbing manner and grisly imagination. The three are soon locked in a chilling battle to discover where the evil truly lurks and what, if anything, can be done to escape it.
The Grownup, which originally appeared as “What Do You Do?” in George R. R. Martin’s Rogues anthology, proves once again that Gillian Flynn is one of the world’s most original and skilled voices in fiction."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Last year, I read and loved Dark Places, and many years before that, I read and enjoyed Gone Girl (hindered a bit for me by the fact I saw the film adaptation first, which leaves out some key factors from the book that tell a very different story). There's a third Flynn I hadn't read, and in trying to get it, I discovered this one as well.
How I Liked It: Books can leave you wanting more. It can be a book that fumbles in the last quarter (sorry, I don't do sports references usually), a book that had the outline to have been much better, or lastly and seemingly most elusively, a book so good that you need more of it, despite it being pretty much perfect just as it is.
But first! Meet our narrator! She's never named in the text (at least, not that I could see?) but she opens with telling us her history in sex work, and some of her backstory.
Her mother was a struggling single mother (her father left the two of them) and to get by, they panhandled and got good at begging strangers for money. Sob stories and tales of woe, all tailored perfectly to get the most amount of money out of whoever they approached. But she got far better at it than her mother and left her behind at sixteen (unfortunately, she also left high school and her status as a honor role student at a charter school she took three buses to attend, leaving her with a lifelong need to prove her intelligence), striking out on her own.
Eventually, she turns up at Spiritual Palms, a psychic shop in a fancy neighborhood looking for a receptionist, which, the narrator explains, actually meant "hooker", as the shop had illegal sex work in the back. The narrator's specialty was handjobs, for which, as she explains to us as the story opens, she had a talent. But unfortunately her high volume of work left her with particularly painful carpal tunnel, and the proprietor of the shop kindly gave her out, getting her into the "psychic" work instead (although she still gives handjobs to clients from time to time), which is (almost entirely) a scam in a different direction, slightly.
All goes fine until she's approached by a woman with a real problem. Or at least, so the narrator thinks. She's got a haunted house she claims, leaking blood and suddenly her teenage stepson (whom she's known since he was four) has gone from cold and introverted to aggressive and angry.
After working out a business plan, our narrator scopes out the mansion and starts regular visits. Eventually, she meets the stepson in question and he leaves quite an impression. And then things start unraveling including the history of the house, who these people really are, and what's really going on. And then it keeps unraveling until we're brought to a conclusion that satisfies (twist upon twist!), but still leaves you wanting more.
I have to admit something embarrassing. I honestly didn't realize this was a short story. I was ready to settle into a nice thick novel. So my expectations were a bit different from what I was going to get. But don't get me wrong! I love short stories. Or rather, I can love short stories. And I definitely loved this one.
It's hard not to compare this to Flynn's previous works, because her previous works are so distinctive. Her most famous scam artist, "Amazing" Amy Dunne of Gone Girl bears some similarities to the narrator, but they're two very different characters. The narrator has some of Libby Day (of Dark Places)'s scrappiness and self-taught nature, but she's far more polished and motivated, and not as dark as Libby Day's past makes her. No, the narrator is entirely a character of her own, and she's highly entertaining.
Flynn continues her excellent, sharp critiques and encapsulations of pop culture, seen well here in this description:
The whole thing was risky, in that [boss] Viveca's clients were mostly upper-middle class and lower-upper class. Being of these classes, they're easily offended. If sad, rich housewives don't want their fortunes told by a Jennifer [Viveca's real name], they definitely don't want them told by a diligent former sex worker with a bad wrist. Appearances are everything. These are not people who want to slum it. These are people whose primary purpose is to live in the city but feel like they're in the suburbs. Our front office looked like a Pottery Barn ad. I dressed accordingly, which is basically the Funky Artist as approved of and packaged by Anthropologie. Peasant blouses, that's the key.(pg 17)
The story doesn't have as much room to pack in the planting and payoff that Dark Places did, but it manages to get in quite a lot in the space it has. There's plenty of twists, as well, and the ending is perfect.
Which leads me to wonder, what would happen if I got my wish and Flynn expanded this short story into a novel? Given how perfectly packaged this is, and how perfect the ending is, would all of that be undone? Probably not. But as it is, it's perfect. You can't help but wonder and want, though.
Notable: In the acknowledgments, Flynn has but one note.
Thanks to George R.R. Martin, who asked me to write him a story. (pg 63)
I love writers helping writers.
Final Grade: A
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