"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.” So opens Gillian Flynn’s short suspense story, about to be published as a standalone novella retitled, after appearing in a George R R Martin anthology last year, as What Do You Do? and winning the Edgar Prize.
The narrator is a young woman, a con artist, who’s been making a rackety living splitting her time between giving (mostly married) men hand jobs and (mostly unhappy) women the benefit of her fake clairvoyant visions.
One day a new customer, Susan, tells her that she believes her house is haunted and that its malevolent forces are turning her teenage stepson into a monster.
She is scared for her life. Entirely sceptical, the con artist agrees to visit the house with a view to exorcising it and is horrified when she feels a nasty presence lurking.
The good news for Flynnies is that in its way this is another mini-Gone Girl: once again she employs unreliable narrators and re-introduces us to the idea that women can be nastier and more vengeful than men, especially when powered by corrosive sexual jealousy.
The con girl may be unpleasant, but she’s the least of it. The bad news is that at just under 80 pages, it’s gone girl too quickly.