The Club

Ellery Lloyd is the pen name for the couple Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, and The Club (2022) is their second novel together. The best-selling psychological thriller was selected by Reese’s Book Club. The Club investigates various aspects of the celebrity experience. Its title refers to both the exclusive membership club at which events take place and the metaphorical club to which celebrities belong, which has a strict internal hierarchy.

This guide refers to the e-book published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Content Warning: The Club depicts rape, sexual assault, and alcohol and drug abuse.

Plot Summary

Ned Groom is the owner of Home Group, a conglomerate of luxury membership clubs. Over Halloween weekend, his employees gear up for the launch of a new resort, Island Home, that caters to celebrity creatives. The book alternates between the events of the weekend at Island Home and a Vanity Fair retrospective on its tragedy. Time-stamped from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning, the chapters are sub-divided into sections framed from four different points of view:

• Jess Wilson, the sudden replacement for Island Home’s head of housekeeping;
• Annie Sparks, the head of membership;
• Adam Groom, Ned’s brother, the head of special projects, and a minority shareholder; and
• Nikki Hayes, Ned’s personal assistant.

The protagonists’ secrets emerge throughout the book and intersect with the hidden affairs of Home’s celebrity guests and Ned, a long-time blackmailer. They eventually result in the deaths of Ned, Adam, and two of the famous guests.

The novel begins with a short, untitled section that is narrated in the second person, a perspective later identifiable as that of Jackson Crane, a famous movie star. During a drunken car accident on the flooded causeway between the mainland and the island, Jackson dies in the company of an unidentified passenger, later revealed as Keith Little, a famous artist. The book then shifts into the first Vanity Fair excerpt, which relates the discovery of the drowned car by breakfasting guests on Sunday morning, before moving into the events of Thursday.

Ned hosts a dinner party for a few chosen members on the eve of the launch. The guest list includes Keith, Freddie Hunter (a late-night talk show host), Kurt Cox (an up-and-coming film producer), Jackson, and his actress wife, Georgia. During the festivities, Ned approaches each of the men individually and demands that they pay staggering sums of money as part of a new membership contract. He tells them that they will receive a “gift” in the coming days, later revealed to be a flash drive with incriminating videos. As the book unfolds, the reader learns that Keith drugs women and takes nude photos of them while they’re unconscious. Freddie mocks his celebrity guests behind their backs and sells their secrets to tabloids. Kurt’s famous father, Ron Cox, had sex with numerous underage girls. Jackson Crane killed a man in a drunk hit-and-run.

Nikki is present at Thursday’s dinner but unaware of the blackmail. A cake is brought out for Kurt, and Nikki is visibly startled when she learns the man’s birthday. On Friday, she confirms that Kurt is her biological child whom she gave up for adoption after Ron impregnated her at age 15. She never that realized Ron then adopted his own son or that Ned facilitated everything from her statutory rape to the adoption as a way to gain leverage over Ron. She kills Ned that night, pushing him into the water and watching him drown. She conceals the crime, and Ned is presumed to be off on an errand.

Jess spends Thursday evening babysitting a last-minute guest’s daughter and steals the woman’s sleeping pills. She adds the drugs to her existing stockpile and uses them to attempt to murder Jackson. Her father was the man whom Jackson killed with his car all those years ago, and Jess and her mother were also in the car. The accident left her mother in a coma while Jess emerged mostly uninjured and with a clear (she thinks) image of the couple that destroyed her family. Jess dumps the drugs into Jackson’s decanter of whiskey and plants evidence on Georgia. She also finds and copies the flash drive with evidence of his crime. When reviewing the video, she discovers that Jackson’s female accomplice coldly took charge of the coverup. Furious, she confronts Georgia during Saturday’s masquerade. Georgia convincingly denies the charge and mentions that her philandering husband is attracted to a specific physical type. At that moment, an extremely addled Jackson stumbles into the party and publicly accosts Adam, whom he believes to be Ned because he is wearing a mask.

Adam misses Thursday’s gathering when Ned sends him to handle some disgruntled locals. His frustration with the task only confirms his determination to quit Home Group. Adam tells Ned on Friday evening, but Ned takes his request to be bought out of Home Group as a threat to reveal Home’s criminal activities. Ned informs Adam that if he demands money, Ned will send Adam’s wife videos of Adam’s transgressions: multiple affairs throughout their marriage. After Ned fails to find this footage, Adam decides to quit anyway—only to be murdered in a case of mistaken identity during the masquerade. When confronted by Jackson, he takes Jackson into a side room and reveals his true identity. After Jackson leaves, Adam re-dons his mask and rests before being strangled from behind.

During the Thursday event, Annie plays hostess, fully knowing and abetting Ned’s blackmail. However, her future falls into jeopardy when Ned objects to an interview that she gave to a magazine. On Saturday morning, she enlists Freddie and Keith in a plan to kill Ned. (No one knows that Ned is already dead.) Freddie backs out at the last minute, but Keith goes through with it, accidentally strangling Adam instead. Keith panics, and he and Jackson flee in a car despite the closed causeway. They both drown.

An Epilogue features the perspective of each of the surviving women as well as Laura, Adam’s wife. With both Ned and Adam out of the way, Annie steps into the role of acting CEO of Home Group. Her reign is short-lived. During the events of the launch, Jess realized that the woman shown in the hit-and-run video is not Georgia but Annie, who superficially resembles her. After the media frenzy dies, Jess sends her copy of the video to the police as well as posting it on YouTube. Dismissed by Annie, Nikki is happy to retreat from the world of Home. One day, she catches sight of her son, Kurt, accepting an award on his now-deceased father’s behalf. Kurt praises Ron as an artist and as a father but denounces both his crimes against young women and the powerful people who enabled him. Proud, Nikki decides to get in contact.