<b>Gillian Flynn's Edgar Award-winning homage to the classic ghost story, published for the first time as a standalone</b><br><br>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. <br><br>"The Grownup," which originally appeared as "What Do You Do?" in George R. R. Martin's <i>Rogues</i> anthology, proves once again that Gillian Flynn is one of the world's most original and skilled voices in fiction.
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Great short story
Having read all of Gillian Flynn's novels, I was not disappointed with this short story. Creepy doesn't begin to describe the teenager who lives with his parents in the old Victorian house that may or may not be haunted, but the kid is for sure. The book is written in first person, by a woman who's retiring from giving 'hand-jobs' because of carpal tunnel syndrome. "I quit because when you give 23,546 hands jobs over a three-year period, carpal tunnel syndrome is a very real thing." page 7 I love how the heroine describes her customers. "They tend to be tense, nervous married men, men with midlevel, mostly powerless jobs. I'm just giving my assessment. They want you attractive but not slutty. For instance, in my real life, I wear glasses, but I don't when I'm in back because it's distracting--they think you're going to pull a Sexy Librarian act on them, and it makes them tense while they wait for the first chords of a ZZ Top song and then they don't hear stand they get embarrassed for thinking that you were going to do the Sexy Librarian and the whole thing takes longer than anyone wants." page 12-13 How can you not love that line? For such a short book, I swear that 5% of Flynn's wonderful-witty prose is highlighted. I'm not sure I ever learned what the main character's name was and she was such a strong, well-drawn character that I didn't even notice until I started writing this review. Born to a mother who was so lazy she couldn't even be bothered to get a job, but she did teach her daughter to beg. Here's a great line about how the heroine got into the job giving hand-jobs. "What I did was purely transactional: You made someone feel good and they gave you money. So you can see why the whole hand-job thing felt like a natural career progression." page 11 With the whole carpal tunnel syndrome going on, our heroine had to find something new to do in order to support herself. Luckily the building she worked in had two career paths; hand jobs and fortune telling. ...
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