The Face You Wear by Faith Pierce

​I received this as an ARC from the publisher. Took me a minute to get to, but well worth the wait. The cover, I must say, is a disappointment. The ARC didn’t have one, but imagination suggested things, all more original and evocative than the end result.
Anyway, cover asides, let’s talk contents. Very, very good.  Strikingly auspicious, especially for a debut novel. This slow-burn tale of descent into madness does it right.
Women going crazy in marriage has obviously been done before (Yellow Wallpaper, anybody?) but there are so many ways to spiral out.
For the protagonist of this novel, it’s the subtle is-she-or-isn’t-she-seeing/imagining-things approach that’s so maddening. She has such a lovely life, one she’s built for herself coming from such humble beginnings: a trailer park with dead father and crazy mother.
Now she’s got a good job, a nice new place, and a lovely spouse: an adoring and charming if absentminded man. The man that once used to be prone to pranks, but surely, he wouldn’t prank his own wife?
And if not him, then who?
And if no one, then is she going crazy? Following in her mother’s twisted footsteps?
It’s an entire novel of guesswork, of desperately trying to separate reality from nightmares as the latter in steadily bleeding into the former, and it’s an impressively compelling journey.
A horrific journey, certainly, though not for the casual guts-and-gore genre fan, this is all in someone’s mind, all the thrills and scares are darkly psychological. But effective, especially that ending.
Very, very good. Recommended. Thanks to Crystal Lake Publishers for the fun read.