Gillian Flynn has proven to be one of my favorite authors. I have yet to read something by her that I did not like. This short story, The Grownup, similarly did not disappoint. It is a ghost story with her usual twists and turns. I definitely recommend it.

One thing I have learned about Flynn's style is that she always has some big world changing twist near the end. Sometimes that can go overboard like M. Night Shyamalan, but somehow she manages to make the twists believable, unexpected, and somehow necessary. That is, rather than feeling like the whole book was jerking you around just to get that twist, you feel as if the twist is very natural and you are somehow stupid for not seeing it sooner. I think this short story was different in that she pulled off multiple twists in a quite small number of pages.

All that being said, I do not want to come across as saying this is a masterpiece. This is the worst of the things that I have read by her, but that does not mean it is bad. Her other books are better, partially because they are long enough to really develop the characters and plot. This was too short to do a lot, so it did pretty well with what room it had to work with.