Dead Inside

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The first thing to know is that this is a brutally descriptive story about the relationship between a necrophiliac and a cannibal. Those are the questions that are swimming through the greymatter within my skull after having just finished reading DEAD INSIDE by Chandler Morrison. This is an interesting book to review because I saw an awful lot of people saying it was the “sickest thing I’ve ever read” or “I couldn’t get past page 1! The relationship between the two main characters is fascinating and horrifying, and yet the author employs dry humor that will not fail to make the reader laugh wryly (well, I did) .

Whether it is a writing on the philosophy of physics, a bleak and joyless monologue on existentialism or something from the protagonist about his preference for coupling with cadavers rather than living flesh, I demand to be plucked outta my mind and transported along on the author's ship-of-the-imagination. When the two of them meet, they embark on a journey of self-discovery as they shatter societal norms while engaging in destructive and abhorrent behavior. Honestly, DEAD INSIDE has a Tarantino-esque quality about it in the sense that it is SO over-the-top offensive, SO over-the-top disgusting that it's *almost* funny. It’s just beyond belief that anything like this could ever happen in real life but honestly, it did its job, freaked me the hell out, and is a book I will never forget. Ever so once in a while, I like getting into a new author and book without any (or the most minimal at least) form of background info check like reading the blurb or reviews.And it is indeed possible to see these as victimless crimes since there is no legal entity, no pain, no trauma inflicted. Helen, on the other hand, likes to eat dead babies and as an obstetrician at the maternity ward she is right at the source to her object of desire. I listened to this on a 3 hour road trip today, and would just love to know what the other drivers on the road thought was happening when they passed my car and saw a 21 year old girl screaming at nobody, steering one-handed with the other clamped over her mouth in complete revulsion, and/or staring out into the distance wondering how she arrived at a point in life where a book like Dead Inside was chosen for a "fun" Thursday read.

In contrast to MC she actually longs to be “normal” but at the same time she is much more able to share her darkness with someone else. I found myself skimming over some of the more detailed accounts of specific actions, just to get to the parts where the characters were having a dialog about their feelings or the story had progressed past points of discomfort and I wanted to see what was going to happen. This story is pretty much American Psycho meets Exquisite Corpse if Jughead Jones (angsty CW edition) was the narrator, written by someone who never totally outgrew their middle school edgelord phase.We are introduced to our protagonist, a hospital security guard who is a necrophiliac, as he can not get aroused by living women despite trying on several occasions and he is content with his life, until one day he catches a doctor in the hospital named Helen committing acts of cannibalism in the morgue. he doesn’t report her to the authorities and they obviously strike up a very weird kinship, because they’re both fucking psychotic.

We follow two people that find each other despite their gross idiosyncrasies - so at the heart of it, it’s a love story. Dead Inside is THE most unsettling, disturbing, and outrageous book I have ever (or will ever) read. it's as if Chandler Morrison wanted to tell a love story about two very abnormal people falling in love and finding a special kind of comfort in knowing that they have been seen by someone and accepted for who they are but he found that a little on the boring side so to really explore what that would look like, he made sure these two very abnormal people were abnormal to a ridiculous, obscene amount of abnormal. If extreme, and I mean EXTREME, sexually explicit horror is something you are interested in then give this one a shot.I'm putting this whole review in spoiler tags, I didn't really think of what could be a spoiler or not while writing it though I think no spoiler I give can spoil your read nor prepare you for what you are about to read. They are on a journey together into the lurid recesses of societal norms and there is no turning back.