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5/11/2025 9:06 AM CST

Dear Reader,

Today, the main meat of our blog will be a review of a modern extreme horror classic, Chandler Morrison’s Dead Inside. It is a pretty messed up book, and I have been told my review is “too long; it really dragged” and that it is “the best review of this book that I have ever read.” I will leave that judgment to you, but before we get there, I must do my obligatory self-promotion and blog promises.

Last week, 5/4, was the official release of the second short in my Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs series, “Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs—Grandma Got Run Over by a Psycho.” I didn’t promote last week because I was just tired. I have recently started ADHD medication, and not only does it allow me to focus better and be generally more efficient with my time, but it has also quieted the ever-present burning drive to constantly be involved in either my writing, publishing, or promoting. I am still passionate about these things, but I have stopped panicking as if everything is going to fall apart if I am not pushing 100% of the time. I allow myself to relax more often, and that’s a good thing. There are so many things to keep up with, and my to-do list is pretty long, but I no longer have this sense of constant dread if I stop to breathe.

With that being said, just because I am not pushing as hard, don’t miss “Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs—Grandma Got Run Over by a Psycho.”

Why has Mike been feeling so low? Why was he on top of the world just months ago? What will he do to get that high back?
Mike Fontaine thought a new start would fix everything. A door-to-door sales gig, 400 miles from home, seemed like the perfect escape. He never expected the cure for his slump to be blood.
In one world, he’s the frontman of a psychedelic hardcore band. In the other, he’s a serial killer. And every time the band releases a record, someone dies.
This is one of those records.

“Grandmas beware! Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs are back in town!! Matthew Jon Smith has found a great horror niche with his Killer Mike character! Let's hope for more Mike adventures! It's like the carnival ride you just want to ride over and over again!! And LOVE them slugs!!”
- Jim Donohue, Author of Ramona

"I'm sorry to say we're passing on ‘Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs.’
We don't publish music reviews, and I don't know how
[Carnage House] wound up on your radar for this."
- Josh Darling, Editor in Chief of Carnage House

“If you love your grandma, this will read like a punch to the suck hole. If you hate your grandma, you'll feel like you just punched HER in the suck hole. Regardless of your feelings about grandmas, it'll be a moist ride.”
-B.S. Miller, Author of A Glimpse of Fear

Go get your copy of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Psycho” today!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0F5SYR5CY

Tell any of your friends that like horror, serial killers, or disturbing slice-of-life stories, and especially any friends that like all three.

Now we can move on to future blog promises. Assuming I will still be able to access my medication after my initial prescription runs out (getting a hold of it in the first place was a whole rigamarole), I can see certain promises I made earlier actually coming to fruition.

·               The INLAND EMPIRE analysis essay might finally see some attention, because I feel like I might actually be able to devote the time to it that it deserves.

·               The Street Fighter and the Art of Craft essay. I promised this one so long ago, it probably has 5,000 words as we speak. The only problem is it looks like it's probably going to have another 5,000 words.

·               An essay talking about what it is like to get into self-publishing for the first time.

·               Reviews: (Books I have already read)

·         Tethered by Kismet – Camille Danciu

·         Aflockapocalypse—Tory Favro

·         Fluids—May Leitz (also maybe Girlflesh)

·               Reviews: (Books I am currently reading or are currently near the top of my TBR)

·         Frogs and Margaritas—Angel Ramon

·         Made a Monster—Rob Nelson

·         Helloween—Duncan Ralston

·         The Home—Judith Sonnet (I also have No One Rides for Free cued up and may randomly dive into that one before The Home.)

·         Not Another 80s Horror Novel—Sean McDonough

These are all things you can expect to read here in the coming weeks, but I always make up my mind last minute when it comes to what I am putting out on any given Sunday.

Ok, without further ado, here is a review. Though this blog is releasing on Mother’s Day, I don’t think this is one you should share with her.

 

“It is not what it looks like.” No, it is EXACTLY what it looks like in Chandler Morrison’s Dead Inside

Review: Dead Inside – Chandler Morrison

My Verdict: Edgelord Supreme. Well written filth. Dark Comedy. Funny if you think full on nihilistic cynicism is funny.

 

Its a love/hate relationship with this book.

Yes, I am a basic bitch. No one asked, but it is true.

The works of Stephen King probably account for 70% of all my reading in life. The remaining 30% consists mostly of Chuck Palahniuk. I don’t consider myself well-read and don’t particularly harbor any ambitions of that nature. That’s not to say I haven’t read some of the classics (Poe, Lovecraft, Hemingway, Steinbeck—East of Eden is brutal—Burroughs, Crichton —is Crichton a classic?—etc.) and even enjoyed most of them, but I just like what I like, and when it comes to books, due to time constraints, I don’t often have the natural inclination to stray too far from my tastes without a little nudge.

Recently, there was a nudge from the universe, more than once, that said, “How about you read some horror from people that aren’t Stephen King? Koontz doesn’t count.” (Isn’t that a meme?) So, I turned to YouTube. I probably searched “best modern horror books” and chose the video with the coolest title. It was a video by Anda Kent about five disturbing books. From that video I learned about Woom, Dead Inside, and some others that I can’t remember and refuse to look up right now. We got my Woom review, and now we get Dead Inside. In the video, Kent said that Woom seemed pretty surface-level and that Dead Inside had a bit more depth.

See, I love art because it is so subjective, and I have to say I disagree. I feel the opposite. That isn’t to say there is no depth to Dead Inside at all, but I am fairly certain Morrison plays at meaning, only to pull the rug out from under you, and that, in and of itself, is the point. So, in a way, I feel Dead Inside is intentionally shallow. It has no interest in getting involved; getting involved is a mess. Not that it isn’t a good point, and it isn’t that Morrison doesn’t drive that point home in the most literal of ways. It’s just that it seems to be all that the book is saying.

It’s better to be Dead Inside. There’s your point. Nihilism, cynicism, pessimism? Take your pick. I am not against a book like this, but it sure was something.

I lucked out because someone in Books of Horror, Cait Miles, put out a post talking about this book and how a friend had given it to her and how she wanted to pass on the cursed thing to someone who was interested. I commented, saying I was interested, and a Dead Inside book chain was formed. I will be mailing it out to the next person in the chain soon.

What an awful thing to do to somebody, send them a book like this.

For those of you who aren’t already familiar with the premise of this book, allow me to fill you in. Man who exclusively copulates with dead women takes security job at local hospital so he can have easy access to the pick of the litter in the hospital’s basement morgue. This prince charming meets a maternity doctor with a similar, shall we say, kink that is possibly more disgusting than even his own. Spoiler: She eats dead babies. What are your trigger warnings? Doesn’t matter. This book probably has your triggers.

The protagonist, who I believe remains nameless, is a less whiny Holden Caufield, or maybe a less macho Bukowski. The character lacks depth. He even announces it. He is really only driven by a singular interest, necrophilia, and has built his entire life around this one single pleasure. Sure, he reads and enjoys music, but that is about as close to a real personality the character is allowed to have. He is dead inside. Since Morrison tells the story in present tense from a first-person perspective, this is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is that, because of his single-mindedness, very little in the story doesn’t serve to move the plot along. The curse is that he can be a little repetitive. He is constantly reminding us he doesn’t care, and what little feelings he does have, he resents. The slight presence of feelings allows for the glimmer of an arc.

There is a character arc here, sure, but maybe more like an anti-arc, because, like I said earlier, I believe the only reason Morrison lets up on the nihilistic gas was so he could create a climax. You can’t pull the rug out from under someone if there is no rug to pull. Unfortunately, I saw the rug pull coming a mile away, though we will get to that later.

The other lead is Helen, our disturbing maternity doctor.

Before we go any further, I guess I must explain that while Dead Inside “takes place in reality,” it is a heightened and cartoonish reality. This is the type of world where a miscarriage can go wrong, the husband can lose control and murder himself and others in a sudden, bloody fit of rage, the maternity doctor who watched the event can then go down to the morgue and eat the resulting miscarriage, and this is just a normal Tuesday in this world.

So, Helen is basically a cartoonish version of the main character’s wet dream. She is gorgeous, harbors a dark secret, and looks dead in the eyes. She is well written and quite literally the heart of the story, but also a prop. Maybe this is intentional. She follows a similar anti-arc, where we watch her come to revelations about who she is, only to do what is inevitable for her, and finally become the abject object Morrison created her to be. Our investment in her character only serves to amplify this objectification.

This book is pessimism incarnate. I “liked” reading it. It is a well-written story, and you can’t help but fall for the awkward chemistry between our two horrific lead characters. She is trying to bring some humanity into his life, and he is trying to get her to let go of self-judgment. I hate to say this, but it is a sweet dynamic and is hard to take your eyes off of, but when the author made it clear what kind of story this was from the very start, I knew not to believe any of the optimism he was trying to sell me. But seeing as an unwavering commitment to negativity and pessimism seemed the obvious intent, I cannot say the story didn’t achieve what it aimed to do nearly flawlessly. There are a few moments where the gore derails into vapidity, perhaps stupidity, but even as the story itself begs the main character for a poetic interpretation, he denies meaning to the gory end, and I have to applaud the commitment to the message, or lack thereof.

I will say that I laughed a number of times. There was one line, which is a very tropey line, but the circumstances under which a character used it in this book were pitch perfect, and I laughed like a maniac. The line happens early, and it was simply, “It’s not what it looks like.” If you know, you know.

Ok, so if this is for you. Go read it. I have never read a book that made me feel more gross while reading it. With that said, the prose is pretty tight, and the thing moves along at a hypnotic pace. Though a tad repetitive about certain points, there isn’t much fat on the bone. The thing is lean and mean. You should go in with as few spoilers as possible.

BUT

I want to spoil it, so deal with it or go away. Bye.

Ok, so with this given setup, there is a logical conclusion.

Man who likes doing the dirty with dead bodies. Woman who likes to eat dead babies. They meet. They fall in “love” to the extent that our main character is capable. A pregnancy occurs. You fill in the rest. My only complaint is that one of the two scenes I abhorred (I know you CAN write anything you want in a story and it is not hurting anyone, but why would you WANT to write that?) would have been better suited at the end of the book during the big scene and would have been more impactful and even more disgusting there, but I think even Morrison has his standards, and while I hated when and how that act did occur, I was relieved when we didn’t go there again at the end. I got the point before Morrison made it, and by that time, I had basically had enough. That is to say, the story walked up right to the point of overstaying its welcome and ended exactly when and where it should.

The very last detail of the ending was also the only thing I didn’t see coming, and I found it quite a satisfying way to drive the point of the story home one final time. The point? It is messy to get involved. The whole situation was put into play because our main character broke his lone wolf routine. He became too attached, which in this case was still barely attached.

In almost every instance where he gets involved with another person’s life, it comes back to bite him in the ass. See a fellow monster for who she truly is; now he has an unwanted friend. Go against his instincts and get involved with her; now she is carrying his baby, and he has made it abundantly clear he hates children. Encourage this woman to stop judging herself and accept who she is; she starts psychopathically murdering people. This is Murphy’s law of touching humanity.

Related to this, there are a few scenes near the end where the character has insomnia due to his anxiety around the pregnancy. This marked the moment where the ending kicked into gear. I am paraphrasing, but the author states, through the character’s voice, “Everything here now is just to serve a function.” I knew the author was telling me that this scene and the next bits were all mechanical, to get all the dominoes and rugs in place so they could be toppled and pulled.

Even with this hint in mind, or maybe because this hint was in mind, I missed the setup for the actual end. There is a series of events where our main character acts with just a modicum of kindness. Each scene demonstrates a shred of empathy in our main character, despite his constant efforts to remind us he does not care. I knew this was building so that he could let us down and commit his most depraved acts yet, but I missed what the other hand was doing.

In one of those scenes, the main character passively listens to a guy’s problems about his wife cheating. The guy is a total loser who deserves it, but just by interacting and telling the guy to get his wife flowers, our main character sets something in motion. Or does he? Is it just cruel fate? Either way, I should have seen it coming, and I didn’t, and that was a bit of fun, wudn’t it, guv’na?

I am running out of steam. I stayed up too late last night reading this. I wanted to also mention that similar to Woom, I feel like Chuck Palahniuk’s DNA is all over Dead Inside. I could be wrong; it could just be that Palahniuk was one of my only touchpoints for subversive fiction until recently. I just want to say, if you are one of those people that look at extreme horror and go, “I want to, but I don’t really know if I can handle it,” I recommend some of Palahniuk’s work, such as Haunted, Rant, Invisible Monsters, and even Choke, as primers for the kinds of depravity you are going to find in extreme horror. Extreme horror often takes it further, or perhaps takes it there more constantly, so it is not that extreme horror isn’t disturbing; it very much is, but if you have the Chuck inoculation, I feel like you go in with +6 to your defense. There are so many other gross books ol’ Chuck has written that will stir up the same kinds of feelings. Just read the descriptions, and you’ll get it.

Anyway. What was I talking about? Go away. I still have to edit this trash.