When George R.R.
When George R.R. Martin came out with a short story anthology, Rogues, in 2014, the hype surrounding The Rogue Prince, a Westerosi tale of the Targaryens (fans of GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire would need no reference), was inevitable. The compilation, however, boasted other big names as well — Gillian Flynn, Joe Abercrombie, Neil Gaiman, to name a few.
Flynn's ghost story, What Do You Do , went on to win the 2015 Edgar Award for best short story. It was repackaged as a novella, The Grownup, in time for Halloween this year.
The narrator in The Grownup is a nameless, street-smart woman in her 30s, who comes from a troubled childhood: she begged for a living with a “lazy” mother and has an arrest record for petty thefts, “dumb stuff that will ensure I never ever ever get a decent job”. Now, she works at Spiritual Palms, a shadowy psychic place with a front room of fortune-tellers, mostly catering to women, and a shady back room for men seeking hand jobs.
At the outset, the woman tells us: “I didn't stop giving hand jobs because I wasn't good at it. I stopped giving hand jobs because I was the best at it.” Some “23,546 hand jobs”, the narrator tells us, have given her carpal tunnel syndrome, so she has cut down on work in the back room and moved on to the front room. Reading auras for rich, depressed and lonely housewives and conning them by predicting bright futures is easy enough, albeit a bit boring.
This changes the day a woman named Susan Burke comes calling. She's mousy, but “different”, intelligent. And she's terrified. The narrator immediately senses that something is wrong. When Susan talks of a house with walls that bleed and a 15-year-old angry, threatening stepson, it presents the perfect opportunity to the ambitious young woman to get a foot in the door: clean the aura of the house, make friends with the rich and the beautiful, and expand the business.
The house and the vicious, smirking teenager Miles turn out to be more than a handful though. The Burkes’ Victorian home is eerie and has a sinister presence, enough to spook even the charlatan. She feels a chill down her spine the moment she lays eyes on it. “It lurked it seemed alive, calculating... I watched the house. It watched me back.” Despite her lack of belief in almost everything, the creepiness of Carterhook Manor and its inhabitants — past and present — scares the narrator and fills her with dread.
From this point on, Flynn effortlessly plays a little game of hide-and-seek with her readers, keeping them on the edge, teasing and surprising them.
This is Flynn’s territory, and she owns it. The bestselling author of Gone Girl once again reveals that canny ability to give us twisted, dark characters, at the same time keeping her dry, ironic humour intact. Her narrator is an excellent and keen observer of human behaviour. The woman doesn’t just poke fun at others, she doesn’t spare herself either: “I’m in customer service I would rather be a librarian, but I worry about the job security. Books may be temporary, dicks are forever.”
The writing in The Grownup is wry, clever and entertaining. It’s simple, but effective, compelling. Flynn is a master storyteller and wastes no time in this page turner; it’s sharp, crisp and taut and the twists keep you guessing till the very end. With its intriguing plot, it’s easy to see the story lending itself to a film in the future.
Even as the reader is still trying to determine who is lying and who is not, the story ends on an ambiguous and disturbing note, and leaves you thirsting for more.
