The Grownup

The Grownup is a short novel by the American writer Gillian Flynn, published in 2014 by Crown Publishers. It first appeared as a story in an anthology of tales inspired by the work of Roald Dahl.

The woman telling the story has been running small frauds for years, and the one she has settled on involves reading auras at Spiritual Palms. She is a good judge of people and knows it, which is how she reads Susan Burke the moment she walks in: beautiful, rich, and bored enough to want a drama of her own. Susan has a stepson she cannot manage and a house she has come to be frightened of, and she offers the narrator a job that involves going into it. What follows is a story about a woman who does not believe in the supernatural being asked to prove that a haunting is real, and about how much of what she is told she is willing to accept when the money is good.

Flynn keeps the narration in the voice of someone who has never stopped explaining her own cleverness, and the effect is a con story with a ghost in it, told by a woman whose account of herself is the least reliable thing in the book.