The Grin in the Floor: Jeff Strand’s Facial

This month we kick off a new mini-reading series for our short subject Sunday reviews, checking out a few works from prolific writer Jeff Strand. For those not familiar with the author, let’s set up our subject. Regular readers of our Thursday reading series know how Donald E. Westlake invigorated the comic caper through his years of writing standalones as well as series such as the Dortmunder books; Jeff Strand is a kind of splatstick flipside to Westlake, building a career in the humorous branch of horror and dark suspense stories. Early in his career, Strand kicked off the Andrew Mayhem series of thrillers about a regular guy who finds himself facing off with a variety of horrific adversaries in his efforts to make a buck and take care of his family. A series of books like this can easily stand alongside such early Westlake fare as The Fugitive Pigeon, both tackling young everymen who find themselves over their heads, told with zing and wit and an offbeat sense of humor. The books balanced the comic and the creepy quite nicely. Strand’s Mayhem series is four books long, at present. The vein of relentless suspense with comic touches would continue in novels like the Bram Stoker Award nominated Pressure, a buddy story about a psychopath who wishes his pal would become one too, as well as works such as Bring Her Back or Cold Dead Hands. However, Strand also explores the world of the relentlessly funny infected with a macabre streak in works such as “Really Really Ferocious” (found in the aptly titled collection, Gleefully Macabre Tales), which reimagines the horror tale of an attack dog. With a short novel like Clowns Vs. Spiders, Strand weaves a weird little cinematic story about folks fighting not only the giant arachnids of the title but the narrative burden they have been burdened with—the heroes are a troupe of clowns in a world that despises members of that professions. And then there are the unclassifiable books like Kumquat or Cyclops Road, road stories that detour through unique explorations of the quirkier corners found in the everyday world we take for granted. I have long been a fan of the man’s work, we will take a gander at some of his short novels and novellas as our Sunday feature over the next two months.

This week, we look at the author’s 2019 novella Facial. This novella tells the story of a pair of estranged brothers forced into a strange circumstance by an unusual discovery …

Greg is the more respectable of the two, a man who has made a name for himself in industry. Unfortunately, due to circumstances outside his control, he has developed impotence and his wife Felicia has decided to explore alternative relationships. Instead of doing something more honorable, like suggesting polyamory, she has been cheating with a plethora of folks—making up for lost time, in a way, since she was basically a virgin until meeting Greg and soon after marrying him. Well, Gage has had it up to here with the situation and hired a killer to take out one of her more outrageous lovers. He, in turn, takes out the killer and has a dead body on his hands with no real notion what to do with it.

As luck or fate would have it, Greg’s brother Carlton is in need of a dead body. A dead human body, anyway. Carlton is the slob of the two, a slacker with no ambition and no sense of personal dignity. He is a mess and is wholly unprepared to discover the carcass of a dead lion in his basement and the sounds of a commanding voice demanding he move the damned dead thing already. Someone is stuck under there, and Carlton finds himself at first repulsed by the scenario but eventually tempted to involve himself by promise of a reward. There’s not a person stuck under that lion, well not a normal person. There is a face in his floor. A talking face, a commanding face, a hungry face. It wants meat, human flesh, and it is offering gold in exchange. Carlton is a bent little bastard, attracted and repulsed by this offer. Where is he supposed to find a dead body, however? Well, as it turns out, that’s the moment when Greg calls to confess his crime and Carlton sees an opportunity.

Carlton brings his brother and his brother’s pal Jaspar in on this thing. The face in the floor reveals it has specific interests in carcass parts—heads only, the rest of the bodies are Carlton’s concern. In exchange, the face spits out gold coins it claims comes from a sunken Spanish Galleon. Soon after consuming the dead, a second face appears in the basement floor, speaking in unison with the first.

As they start to make their way through Greg’s nemeses (his wife’s many lovers), Felicia starts to understand something is going on and tries to uncover just what that is. The most reasonable and rational of this motley group of characters, her approach is the more empathic. Of course, she has her own agenda . . .

Soon enough, a whole bunch of questions arise, leaving one to wonder how the author will tackle them in such a short form as this novella:

Who or what are these faces? How did they get in Carlton’s basement? Why are there so many of them? What is the story with the dead lion? How far will these three friends go in their pursuit of gold? Will Greg ever confront his wife directly? Will Carlton ever clean up his pigsty of a house? What is Felicia going to do when she discovers her hubby is a multiple murderer? What’s the ultimate plan here?

What Jeff Strand gives his readers is an offbeat situation that would not have been too out of place in a paperback original from the horror boom of the 1980s or the odder explorations of the 1990s. It is a curious blend of the surreal, the humorous and the horrific as these two brothers explore macabre avenues of homicidal self-expression and greed.

Take, for example, a conversation that erupts between Greg and his close friend Jaspar, after Jaspar volunteers to sever the dead hit man’s head. The volunteering is not the point of contention, his eagerness to do so is:

“Killing somebody is less depraved than severing their corpse’s head.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. Everybody knows that. You shoot somebody, it’s revenge. You do shit to their dead body, it’s deviant.”

“Only if I get sexual excitement out of it.”

“That’s not the rule.”

“I’m doing this because it would be an interesting new experience. And it’s something that needs to be done. If I saw a dead body on the street, there’s no way I would offer to walk over and decapitate it, but this body needs decapitating, so what’s the problem?”

“I didn’t say there was a problem. All I’m saying is that you don’t get to play the ‘I’m Just A Regular Guy’ card.” (Location 7552)

These are not normal folks. These are messed up hombres. How can we empathize with them? Well, we can’t really. These guys are about as easy to like as a pack of Will Ferrell comedy sketch characters; they perform funny antics we can giggle at, and yet all the while we are laughing we secretly hope we are nowhere near as idiotic, unreasonable or awful as these people are.

Facial is told in a series of first person chapters. Typically, these revolve from character to character, giving a mosaic of perspectives. On occasion, subsequent chapters come from the same character’s perspective. Character death does not get in the way of the first person perspective either. A person fed to the face lingers, you see. Here, Strand gives us another view of the classic Sartre definition of Hell. Hell is not merely other people, it is being stuck in a place with a bunch of other people you have nothing in common with other than being fed to a monstrous face in the floor.

In some ways, I read this work as a jokey response to one of the most intriguing paperback original novels to hit stands in the tail end of the horror boom. In the early 1990s, Kathe Koja’s novel Cipher kicked off the Abyss line of books from Dell publishing, positing a hole in the wall of an apartment building that is more than a mere crack in the plaster. That hole was a gateway to some truly dark place, which the poet protagonist Nicholas and his self-destructive gal pal Nakota explored and in turn used to explore their own dark, artistic and fucked up passions. The work was a brilliant exercise in surrealism, avant-garde art and a consideration of the kind of urban horror pioneered in stories like Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost.” Two decades later, Jeff Stand posits a surreal access point to a very dark place sunk into a basement floor. Whereas The Cipher was painfully tragic and downright somber (despite the characters referring to the hole to the Otherworldly as The Funhole), Facial is wildly zany, a splatstick revisionist response to Koja’s first novel. Both works hinge on the ideas of couples facing an otherworldly intrusion, and that intrusion showing women’s innate strength for dealing with the off-putting and men’s weakness in the face of the ineffable.

However, Facial does not dwell on its darker points for long. The pacing of the novella is perhaps a little too fast for comfort, keeping the reader bouncing along on the edge of its wilder twists and weirder turns. Chapters zip forward through time. Dialogue spirals back on itself offering revelations in the sometimes crude verbal jabs and counter jabs that would not be out of place in a Mamet play. We jump through a variety of viewpoints, from protagonists to victims and then spiral out to a much larger worldview montage near the tail end of the book that alone is worth the price of admission.

On a side note, Greg being the cuckolded husband and Carlton his loyal (sort of) brother can lead to plenty of misogynistic thoughts and since the book his told first person, a reader gets up to the elbows in some icky thoughts and dialogue. To be clear, the narrative is not misogynistic—I found Felicia is one of the more sympathetic characters in the book, after all, selfish as she might be—but these guy characters can be, awfully so. Readers sensitive to that particular subject should be advised about the potential trigger material.

Facial might not be horror fiction or humor fiction’s finest hour or even the author’s best work, but it is a relentless exercise in the breed of comic ghastliness Jeff Strand has made a solid reputation for exploring.

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Facial is available as a standalone eBook novella. It is also included in the collection Five Novellas, which has both eBook and paperback incarnations.

Next up, we check out the author’s monster movie for the mind’s eye: Clowns Vs. Spiders. This short novel is available in eBook, paperback and audiobook editions.

WORKS CITED

Strand, Jeff. Facial. Self-Published: 2019.

Strand, Jeff. Five Novellas. Self-Published: 2019.

“The Grin In The Floor: Jeff Strand’s Facial” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Cover and quotes taken from the Five Novellas eBook edition, released 2019. Cover from the Facial standalone eBook taken from the release, circa April 2020.

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