After the success of Gone Girl, the thriller writer is back with a macabre novella full of her trademark chilling twists. Jourdan Fairchild meets the (very normal) queen of darkness

Photography: Christopher Patey

It’s 3:30pm on a clear autumn Tuesday in Chicago, but Gillian Flynn is feeling a bit under the weather. This is the author’s final interview of a long day, so I’m just relieved she didn’t cancel on me (she’s not that type, you can tell). The hotel conference room where we’re meeting is exactly what you’d expect: bleak and dark, save for a glaring overhead light. But Flynn doesn’t seem to mind. Despite the huge success of her third novel Gone Girl – the UK’s number one book in 2013, having sold four million copies here and a further four million across the globe – I work out she’s not high maintenance as soon as she walks into the room. Her straight brown hair is as fuss-free as her outfit: dark jeans, a leather jacket that she slips off as soon as we start chatting, and dangly rhinestone earrings that show she cares, but not too much.

Three years have passed since Flynn was thrust into the spotlight with the success of Gone Girl, one of those rare bestsellers championed by reviewers and passed around like a hot potato among friends. Even those who weren’t thriller enthusiasts couldn’t resist picking up a copy, if only to see what the buzz was about. And in the months that followed, Flynn adapted her complicated characters from the page to a BAFTA-nominated screenplay for the blockbuster film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, whose hauntingly perfect portrayal of Flynn’s Amazing Amy earned her an Oscar nomination. To date, the film of Gone Girl has earned more than £238 million at the box office across the world.

But today we’re here to talk about Flynn’s new short story The Grown-Up, which first appeared in Rogues, a 2014 collection of stories edited by Game Of Thrones author George RR Martin. At the time, Gone Girl was being filmed and the then-pregnant Flynn was still fiddling with scenes in the script. “But if George RR Martin asks you to write a short story, you write a short story,” she says. The first 25 pages are playfully provocative, narrated by a drifter who works at Spiritual Palms, a fortune- telling shop where employees take a “hands-on” approach to healing back-room male customers. After a promotion to the front room where she masquerades as a psychic, the narrator meets a desperate client living with a sinister stepson in an ominous Victorian house. Flynn’s description of the stepson, a perturbed pre-teen with porcelain skin and spider-black eyes, will make your stomach churn with dread and anticipation. And by the final page, you’re desperate for more. Initially titled What Do You Do?, the piece was resurrected as a stand- alone book to be released this November because Flynn’s publishers thought it might deserve a second airing, making no changes except to the title. “It’s OK – I fully admit I’m bad at titles,” she explains.

But Flynn’s always had a thing for short stories, albeit very dark ones. When asked to name her own favourite work, she immediately recalls a one-pager she wrote in Dr Kyle’s third grade class. “To The Outhouse was about this brave pioneer girl who lived in a cabin without plumbing, like the one my parents had in Southern Missouri,” she says. “One day she decides she’s going to outwit the wolves that surround the outhouse. So she bursts forth from the outhouse, but is immediately torn apart and devoured.”

Inside the twisted mind of Gillian Flynn, from identifying with Amy Dunne to writing her new novel