Face

Tim Lebbon

I rather enjoyed The Nature of Balance, the last Lebbon novel I picked up. However, I enjoyed it in a kind of "enjoyed-with-reservations" way; it always seemed like it was teetering on the brink of either completely coming apart or just falling into crashing boredom. Face, unfortunately, is not able to straddle that line.

The premise of the book is relatively simple; a family stops to pick up a hitchhiker on their way home from a vacation. The hitchhiker is a very odd duck, to say the least; from the very beginning of the novel, we're introduced to his ability to do things like throw his voice and unsettle Christians (Megan, the mother of the family, is of the zealous born-again variety, for reasons that become obvious later on). The hitchhiker, who calls himself Brand, disturbs the family to the point where Megan throws him out of the car in the middle of a snowstorm. Bad idea, as he begins stalking them. But this is no ordinary hitch-hiker. He likes manipulating people and situations for, it would seem, his own amusement, and right now, this family and their friends are his amusement.

The actual identity of Brand (never explicitly stated, but should be obvious to most readers by page fifty, if not by the description above) is rather obvious early enough on in the book to not offer any tension whatsoever, and a combination of Brand's acts simply sounding like high-school pranks and Lebbon's lack of editorial guidance in the opening chapters ("opening chapters" here equates to, roughly, "first two hundred pages") conspire to make the first two-thirds of this novel just this side of too-boring-to-keep-reading. It does pick up at the end, slightly, going from the snail setting on the blender to the sloth setting. But even that great leap in mastery of pace doesn't help, by that time.

If you're going to read Lebbon, I rather suggest starting with The Nature of Balance and leaving this on the shelf. But why bother, when you've got authors like Tom Piccirilli, Simon Clark, etc., writing in the same general vein of not-quite-psychological-but-not-gross-out horror who do it that much better? Piccirilli's The Night Class or Clark's Blood Crazy would be a far more satisfying, and compelling, read than this one.