Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

[glowstars]

When you tell YD La Mar that you don’t think you have any triggers, she’s gonna throw you recommendations to test that theory. Chandler Morrison’s Dead Inside was one of many ideas she gave me and I can see why. If this book doesn’t hit a trigger for you, I’m not sure anything will.

If you’ve not already figured it out from the blurb or heard the rumours, the book is about a necrophiliac and his relationship (can you call it that?) with a cannibal. Specifically, he likes dead girls and she eats dead babies. It’s written entirely from his point of view, but it wasn’t until I was some way through the book that I realised he never shares his name. So, from now on, we’ll just call him the MC.

For someone who claims to be dead inside and to hate people, the MC is surprisingly perceptive when it comes to human behaviour. His observations are borderline brutal but are also accurate to a T. There’s a sense of sarcasm to his narrative that I’m not convinced can come from the emotionless person he claims to be.

I’ll be honest: the storyline is quite predictable, and that’s despite me never having read anything quite like it before. When the MC first meets Helen, his counterpart in taboo, it’s obvious they are kindred spirits. Despite her being a living, breathing human being it’s inevitable they will sleep together. From there on, you only need to follow subtle clues to have the ending wrapped up before you’ve read anywhere near it.

Before getting started, I glanced at a few reviews to see what I was getting myself into. Poor writing was one on the top of the list but I have to disagree. Yes, there were moments when the writing itself was pretty damn bad, but when you put that next to others which were pure brilliance, you can see that it’s a technique employed instead of a failure on the author’s part.

There’s a huge amount of emotion in the book, especially when it comes to the conflicts the MC faces. He struggles with his feelings for Helen and the consideration that she’s not dead (interestingly, he never describes her as alive) and is unable to deal with the idea of what he may have to give up if he enters into a relationship with her.

I’ll be honest, up until the end of the book I was going to give it a higher rating than it ended up with. For me, the ending fell flat. One minute I was in the middle of a big drama and what was possibly the MC’s best moment yet, and the next, nothing. That was it. No come down, no conclusion. I was literally left hanging. Sure, there’s room for a sequel but something makes me think that’s unlikely.

Should you read Dead Inside? Yes. In the same way that you really should read American Psycho or A Clockwork Orange (and no, the movies do not count). It’s disgusting, it’s unhinged, but at the same time, it’s also a beautiful story of two people falling in love, despite one believing that he’s incapable of love and having little desire for it anyway. It shows how even those of us who don’t fit the mould of ‘normal’ can still find our people. Who doesn’t want that in a story?