The Grownup

The narrator makes her living by reading people. A small-time con artist who graduated from a seedy 'spiritual' parlour to fake psychic work, she has a gift for telling anxious clients exactly what they want to hear — and separating them from their money.

Then she meets Susan Burke, an elegant, frightened woman convinced that something is deeply wrong with her family's grand Victorian house, Carterhook Manor, and with her sullen teenage stepson, Miles. Sensing an easy mark, the narrator agrees to 'cleanse' the house. But once inside, she begins to suspect that not everything can be explained away as a con — and that she may no longer be the one in control.

Gillian Flynn's Edgar Award-winning novella is a wickedly sharp, deeply unsettling homage to the classic ghost story. Featuring an unreliable narrator and a famously ambiguous ending, it packs Flynn's trademark menace and dark wit into a single, gripping sitting.