Dead Inside
By Chandler Morrison
2020 Death’s Head Press
Made-to-order Paperback, 162 pages
This
book got a lot of comments on the Books of Horror Facebook page and it piqued my
interest. Disgusting, vile, sickening, “I had to put it down”… it almost seemed
like a challenge. When I saw it had a necrophiliac character, I happily put it
into my Amazon basket.
The
main character, a hospital security guard, is indeed a necrophile. His morgue
visits were more than just doing his rounds. He eventually meets a maternity
doctor, a woman who enjoys eating abortions. He finds out her secret and an
oddball romance ensues. That’s right; Dead
Inside is a romantic story, and a pretty goddamn funny one, too.
Yes,
it’s gross for grossness’s sake, but there is a wicked sense of humor
throughout. Told in first person in the security guard’s voice, his bleak outlook
of the world and his casual acceptance of what he is drives the narrative and
makes for quite a few chuckles. Sure, there is explicit corpse fucking, fetus
eating, combinations of the two, skull fucking, slime, ooze, ejaculate and
nihilism, but somehow, I could understand the guard’s motives and I’ll be
damned if I didn’t agree with some of his thoughts.
Dead Inside is extremely well written
and engaging, once you accept the fact that it is an extreme horror book that
aims to shock. But shock isn’t the main objective, I don’t think. I’ll be
looking for more of Morrison’s books. This one was good. Unlike any other romance novel you have ever read.
This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #9, March, 2022.
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