Facial by Jeff Strand : Review
Greg has just killed the man he hired to kill one of his wife’s many lovers. He’s now got a dead body in his office.
Carlton, Greg’s brother, desperately needs a dead body. It’s kind of related to the lion corpse that he found in his basement.
This is the normal part of the story.
From Jeff Strand, the author of Benjamin’s Parasite, The Sinister Mr. Corpse, and Fangboy, comes a tale that’s weird even by his standards.
Facial. It’s not about what you’re thinking. Well, okay, part of it is…
It’s been weeks now since I finished Facial by Jeff Strand, It’s the first of his books that I have read, and I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about it. While I found the story to be fairly well written, it also go dark and twisted very quickly. There were a few scenes so gross and squicky that I felt like I needed to get up and take a shower after reading them. Yet despite that feeling cropping up so often, I found myself unable to put the story down. Facial is the kind of story that while you may regret picking it up, you are unable to make yourself put it down again. I don’t really know what I was thinking when I decided, after reading the stories synopsis, that I just had to read it. I don’t know if I could really explain just how weird the story got.
After he kills the hit-man he hired to kill the one of the multititude of lovers his promiscuous wife has had, Greg finds himself with something of a problem, he has a dead body and no way to dispose of it. Lucky for Greg his brother Carlton has a problem of his own: he has a lion corpse on the floor of his basement, and is in need of an additional dead body to help get rid of it. I think it really says something about the twisted nature of Facial that the dead body and lion corpse are soon going to be the least of Greg and Carltons problems. What do you do a face appears in your basement floor demanding food for riches? You feed it of course.
There really isn’t much more I can really say about this novella, other than the fact that I actually enjoyed it in the end. I mean yes, it may have been so dark and twisted I found myself questioning my sanity for even picking it up. And yes I may have wanted to crawl into my closet and curl up into the fetal position occasionally while reading it, but that feeling passed quickly.
Despite the grossness–or maybe because of it, I’ve found myself picking it up to reread it multiple times since I finished it. That probably says more about it than anything I could actually say here, there aren’t many short stories or novella’s I reread. I think anyone who is a fan of bizzaro fiction should check out Facial, and don’t let the title fool you, it’s not about what you think it is. At least not completely.
Facial by Jeff Strand is set to be published December 16th by Darkfuse
I received a free copy of this publication for an honest review.
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