The Inside Out Man Plays a Haunting, Horrific Melody

Jazz pianist Bentley Croud is told his estranged father is dead, and his only inheritance is a key, delivered inside of a carved box with no instructions as to its use. Soon after, Bent meets a man named Leonard. Leonard loves the way Bent plays jazz, he says, and hires him for a weekend gig, entertaining the guests at his mountainside mansion.
At the end of the weekend, millionaire Leonard makes Bent an offer, and it comes with strings: Leonard feels his life is meaningless, and decides to find out if its true by keeping himself locked in a single room for an entire year. He wants Bent to be his jailer; he’ll be welcome to live in Leonard’s home and enjoy the spoils of wealth, and must only deliver his captive meals three times a day.
His senses slowed by a lavish dinner, Bent agrees to the deal. The only proof of the arrangement is a sealed document, to be read by a lawyer only upon Bent’s instruction. The rules engage as Bent turns the lock in the door: Leonard must remain in the room for 365 days. Bent is only to bring him meals at the appointed times during the day. And he is never respond when Leonard speaks.
Bent, who feels himself a failure as an artist, soon sees a darker opportunity in his new arrangement, and considers a scheme to starve his willing captive and steal his identity. After all, he has the paperwork, and he’s the only one what Leonard has agreed to. Or so he thinks: Bent soon begins to sees shapes and figures in the mist outside the secluded mansion. He begins to experience strange periods of unconsciousness when he plays the piano, overtaken by the music.

He falls in love with Jolene, a single mother and Leonard’s former lover. As their courtship progresses, Bent finds himself wondering if Jolene in on Leonard’s plan. And when Leonard’s son Howard, a far more successful musician than Bent, visits his father’s house, Bent’s life takes a certain turn for the worse, and things get complicated. How to explain the dead body in his father’s mansion, the stink of the corpse hidden behind a locked door?
The novel grows more unsettling as Bent’s grip on the situation, and reality, begins to loosen. Strydom (The Raft) places all present-tense dialogue in italics, while only speech occurring in the past is given attribution; this and other stark linguistic shifts between past and present highlight the protagonist’s growing unreliability.
The Inside Out Man is at its most haunting when Bent is left at the piano bench, his hands walking along the keys. It succeeds when he is given enough rope to hang himself with his own flawed humanity, and his own self-doubt. The story is focused on this inner struggle perhaps to a fault; while the male characters are fleshed out, their motivations clear and haunting, the women remain, if you’ll pardon the pun, one note: the love interest, the alcoholic, the barmaid. This is a masculine novel, driving home a male perspective, and we see the women through their eyes; Jolene fares best, but considering the way Bent fetishizes and objectifies her, it’s difficult to tell who she is, versus who he believes her to be—until she asserts ownership of her own life. In a book of unreliable characters, I found Jolene the most likable, because at least she does what she wants.
This novel never reveals the whole truth, and frankly, we don’t need to hear it. By the end, we know what Bent experienced, whether at the hands of Leonard, or under the stress of his own conscience.  The ending arrives with a climactic flourish, but it’s not the ending you expect, nor the one hinted in the opening chapters. The notes on the page appear jumbled, until they don’t; the unnerving melody coalesces. It was always there, humming along in the background, just waiting for the crescendo. A box. Strange paintings. A memory turned inside out.
The Inside Out Man is available now.