Grant is Alice’s wealthy and powerful 38-year-old husband. When the story opens, he has supposedly been dead for two weeks, but in the narrative’s backstory he is dedicated to both his career and his social position, working long hours and insisting on fancy restaurants, designer clothes, and a housekeeper for the expensive home he shares with Alice. To those outside the marriage, Grant appears to be perfect—handsome, attentive, and generous. Poppy believes him to be “kind and honest and handsome” (66), and his former secretary, Eliza, calls him a “wonderful man” whom she considered “thoughtful. And charming” (23).

This is how he initially appeared to Alice as well, as he courted her with a rush of romantic gestures that impressed her with his wealth and seeming devotion, and he proposed to her just eight months into their relationship. This all proved to be a manipulative facade, however, as Grant grew increasingly controlling. Finally, he flew into a days-long rage when Alice refused to agree with him about the color of the blue-and-black dress, even threatening to have Alice institutionalized over it. His obsessive anger and threats during this time are what cause Alice, in the narrative present, to repeatedly characterize Grant as a “monster,” establishing him as the story’s antagonist (56, 63, 68). He is a caricatured villain of a type very common in domestic thrillers—the outwardly perfect husband who is secretly abusive and controlling. The use of this trope supports the story’s theme of The Difficulty of Genuinely Knowing Others.

The content of Grant’s fantasy story, however, reveals an unexpectedly imaginative and whimsical side to his character; he is not a polished writer or daringly original thinker—as his reliance on fantasy tropes like taming a dragon and warring families shows—but like his wife, he has a clear interest in escaping from ordinary reality. This aspect of his personality offers tangential support for the novella’s contentions about Thrillers as an Escape from the Mundane.

The narrative does not reveal whether the man in the shower in the epilogue is actually Grant himself or the unnamed third Lockwood brother. By extension, it cannot be known whether the man Alice and Poppy killed and buried in the back yard is Grant or his brother. Some conclusions about Grant’s character can nonetheless be drawn from the final third of the novella. It is certain that Grant lied to Alice about his family during their entire relationship. The events that transpire after “Brant” appears in Alice’s yard show that either Grant Lockwood is engaged in a protracted cat-and-mouse game with Alice—stalking her, seducing her again in the guise of his brother Brant, and then revealing himself and threatening to kill her—or he has put his other brother up to these same actions. Grant is also responsible for the death of at least one and possibly two of his own brothers. All of these actions support Alice’s portrait of Grant as obsessive, manipulative, controlling, and cruel.

Poppy is Alice’s best friend. She is a warm, steady, and upbeat person who provides Alice with support and common sense advice throughout the story. She is often more logical and level-headed than Alice is, providing a foil for Alice’s sometimes scattered and irrational thinking. She does not initially believe the idea that Grant Lockwood has somehow come back from the dead, for instance, telling Alice that this is an irrational thought. She discourages Alice from rushing to believe Marnie, and she is stunned when Alice jumps to the conclusion that Poppy is a hallucination in Chapter 27. Poppy is the one who clears up the “IUD”/”LED” misunderstanding for Alice, as well. When Alice is confused about Brant in Chapter 23, her first thought is to seek out Poppy’s advice, because “she has a great way of looking at things” and can be counted on to protect Alice’s best interests (97).

Poppy is fairly selfless, only seeming mildly put out by the fact that Alice depends on Poppy without offering much in return. Because Poppy’s only function is to be a sounding board for Alice and offer Alice emotional support, she is a flat and static character about whom not much is known. Even Alice seems to know relatively little about her, beyond that she has brown hair and lives next door. In Chapter 23, Alice comically proves that she does not even know which “next door” house Poppy lives in. When Poppy mentions her husband in Chapter 28, this is the first the reader hears about Poppy being married at all because she rarely speaks about her own world and focuses all of her attention on Alice’s.

For all of her support toward Alice, however, Poppy’s knowledge of her friend is imperfect. She constantly offers Alice tea and brings her casseroles, intending these as gestures of comfort and support—unaware that Alice hates both tea and casseroles. She does not know what Alice and Grant’s marriage was really like. Both the novella’s thin characterization of Poppy and Poppy’s own seeming inability to read Alice illustrate the difficulty of genuinely knowing others.

Marnie is a character who first appears in Chapter 7, claiming to be Grant’s other wife. At this point in the story, she appears to be part of a common trope in domestic thrillers—the secret second family. Later, it will be revealed that, unbeknownst to Marnie, her partner is actually Brant Lockwood, pretending to be Grant. Little can be known about her relationship with Brant, as the novella’s only explanation of this relationship comes from whichever Lockwood brother is pretending to be Brant in Chapters 21-23, and there is no way to confirm the details this person provides.

Marnie’s own actions prove her to be a sly, manipulative woman who will do whatever she needs to do in order to provide for herself and her many children. When she tracks down Alice to demand part of Grant’s estate, she characterizes her relationship with “Grant” as a marriage, which proves not to be the case—she and Brant were never legally married. Telling Alice that it was a marriage, however, creates the impression of a legal entanglement that might give Marie rights to at least some of Grant’s money. She shows that she knows how to pull at Alice’s heartstrings when she shows Alice a photo of one of her youngest children and then insists that Alice come meet the kids in person. The humorously unnatural dialogue between her and one of her children about a lack of food and electricity is clearly coached, indicating that she has prepared this in advance as a tactic to manipulate Alice.

Marnie disappears from the story after Chapter 10, having served the purpose of introducing the question of how Grant could possibly have had time for a secret second family. This sets up the later revelation that he did not have this kind of time—but what he did have was a secret twin, Brant, who was Marnie’s real partner.