Interview with Chandler Morrison, Author of Dead Inside

When reading an impactful title, such as Chandler Morrison's Dead Inside, one may have many questions for the author who crafted such a tale.
I find myself lucky to be able to share an interview with Mr Morrison about one of the most interesting and awe-inspiring books I've ever read.

First, a bit about Dead Inside...

A security guard goes about his day-to-day life, trying his best to stay under everyone's radar; and that's not just because he has one very peculiar, and many would argue sickening interest...

See, this guard prefers the company of dead girls over living ones. However, one night he meets Helen, and realises that he's not the only one with nasty habits.

I'm so pleased to have gotten the chance to interview the author of this devastatingly well-written and incredible title - enjoy!

First of all - what inspired you to write this title? A lot of people assume I wrote it for shock value, which wasn’t the case at all. I never think about people’s potential reactions when writing a book; the reader doesn’t even cross my mind during the writing process, and even when it’s done, I’m not particularly invested in how it’s received.

The creation of each book is an intensely personal experience. I’m always working through something, and Dead Inside was no different. I had just gotten out of a very bad relationship that led to a period of extreme darkness in my life, and I was trying to write my way out of that darkness while sort of figuring out what made me get so wrapped up in such an unhealthy pairing in the first place.

All of that is obviously submerged beneath several layers of obfuscation in the form of social commentary and genre parody, but the emotional truth of what I was going through is there at its core.

Was there any significance in not giving the main character a name? I guess I wanted to give him an anonymity that suggested he could be anyone. There are so many people with whom we cross paths in the course of a day, and we never know what they’re thinking or what sorts of things they do when no one else is around. Anyone could be a monster. Everyone could be.

 

Did you write any alternate endings, or would the story always have ended the same? No, no alternate endings. It was always going to be exactly what it is. I never feel like I’m guiding the direction of the story or deciding what actions the characters take. It’s like there’s this separate universe that exists in my imagination, and I simply go there and write down what I see.

In that vein, the story itself is always the least interesting aspect to me. I don’t really care about plot, even as a reader. I’m much more interested in style, mood, atmosphere. Vibes. Plot is just a way to move the characters from one scene to the next.

 

What contributed to the somewhat gory & vivid scenes within the book? It’s endlessly baffling to me that the gore is so often what people get out of the book. I’m especially surprised by the readers who see it as shock value, because I just don’t know how you can take any of it seriously enough to be offended by it. It’s all deliberately over the top and absurd to the point that none of it is realistic.

The abortion clinic scene, for instance, about which so many people love to draw ire, isn’t even logistically or scientifically feasible. I was trying to parody the “extreme horror” genre, because so much of extreme horror is kind of silly. The excessive gore in Dead Inside is supposed to bring a comedic levity to offset the grim bleakness of the rest of the book.

It’s interesting that so many people miss that and just classify it among the same books it’s making fun of, because I never have and never will consider myself an extreme horror author, or even a horror author. I’ve always identified primarily as a satirist, but I think the internet has made it difficult for people to recognize satire in a lot of cases.

 

Were there any parts in the book that you found difficult to write? There’s a page or two near the end where the narrator can’t sleep, and he starts experiencing symptoms of sleep deprivation. I wanted that to be authentic, so before writing that sequence, I made myself stay awake for something like five straight days.

Sleep is something I quite enjoy, so I guess that was pretty tough. I’m older now and I don’t think I could do something like that again.

Dead Inside can be found on Amazon, as well as the Kindle store!