The Inside-Out Man
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- USD 5.99
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- USD 5.99
Publisher Description
Brilliant jazz pianist Bent lives from gig to gig in a city of dead ends. He is plagued by fragmented visions of the past, and has resigned himself to a life of quiet desolation. That is, until the night he meets wealthy and eccentric jazz fan Leonard Fry.
In the days that follow, Leonard makes Bent a devilish deal, proposing a bizarre experiment in which Bent will play a vital part.
The deal provides an opportunity for Bent to start afresh, to question everything he knows, and for the two men to move beyond the one terrifying frontier from which neither of them can be sure they’ll ever return: the borders of their own sanity.
Fred Strydom’s novel The Inside-Out Man is a jazzy and surreal mind-bender of a book.
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.
