Bark at the Ghouls

Jeff Strand dips his whole body in the Bizarro sub-genre with this one. Facial has Strand’s snarky sense of humor out in full force but damn is it ever weird. Flesh-eating face in the floor kind of weird. If that’s your thing read on.

Greg’s wife is cheating on him. Instead of confronting her, he hires a sarcastic hit man to off one of her lovers. Greg doesn't appreciate the hit man’s sarcasm, shoots him dead and saves himself some bucks. But now he’s stuck with a body.

Carlton arrives home to find the rotting corpse of a lion in his basement but wait things get worse and weirder. There's a voice coming out from under the lion, demanding human flesh, blood and bone. If Carlton doesn’t deliver, this face in the floor declares Carlton and his family will die. Carlton ponders for a second or two.

Screw it. I’d do it. My existing plans for today were: watch television, eat stale graham crackers with stale marshmallows, and cry a little…so why not? It was a break from the norm. I could quit at any time. I’d make it clear to the possible viewing audience that I was in on the joke. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” 

Fortunately Carlton’s bro Greg has a fresh corpse at the ready, eh?

Dismemberment and minor grossness follow, more faces grow out of the floor and they’re all hungry. It’s a good thing there are a lot of men out there who have done Greg wrong . . . or, really, just done his wife!

This was a weirdly entertaining story with enough sarcasm and dark humor to keep me happy. I’m giving it a 3 ½ because of the constantly switching first person point of view and the fact that all of the characters sounded eerily and confusingly similar. Even though each chapter clearly tells you who is going to be speaking, I still managed to mix them up because, again, the similarities, and I had to do some backtracking. Sort of frustrating after a bit.

*I received this book via Netgalley.