The Inside Out Man
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A young musician receives an unusual offer from a wealthy stranger in this haunting story of psychological horror.
Bent is a jazz pianist living gig-to-gig in a dark city of dead-ends. With no family, and no friends, he has resigned himself to a life of quiet desolation. That is, until the night he meets the enigmatic Leonard Fry.
After accepting an invitation to his countryside mansion, where Leonard resides on his own, Bent is offered a deal of Faustian proportions.
“There is a room in this house. There’s only one way in and one way out . . . There’s one lock on the door, and only one key to that lock. Now, what I’m going to ask may seem strange to you. I don’t necessarily need you to understand, but what I do need is for you to agree to help me.”
Disillusioned with his life of excess, Leonard has decided to explore the final frontier of his existence, the margins of his mind, by locking himself in a small room in his mansion for a year. In exchange for Bent’s assistance, everything Leonard owns will be Bent’s for the duration of his self-imposed imprisonment.
But there are two sides to every locked door. As the days go by, and Leonard’s true intentions become clear, Bent will find himself venturing beyond the one terrifying boundary from which he can’t be sure he’ll ever return . . . the boundary of his own sanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Strydom (The Raft) meticulously constructs a house of cards that seems poised to collapse at any moment, taking its protagonist, and his entire world, with it. After jazz pianist Bent Croud plays a debauched weekend party at the sprawling estate of Leonard Fry for an exorbitant amount of money, he is made a very strange offer: Bent can have the run of Leonard's house, cars, and everything else, and all he has to do is feed Leonard through a slot in the door of a locked room that Leonard will remain in for one year. It's a novel way for Bent to escape the grind of dive bars and loneliness, and he even finds something like love with Leonard's charming companion, Jolene, but strange things start to happen, and he begins to question Leonard's true motives and ultimately reality. This exploration of identity and memory reads like a paranoiac's fever dream. Imagery right out of a Boschian nightmare "one fleshy mass with flailing arms and legs, like the rough draft of a new Hindu god" helps to propel the unsettling, compelling tale all the way through to its twisted, fitting finale.
