Chandler Morrison

CONTENT WARNING: SENSITIVE TOPICS ARE DISCUSSED HERE SUCH AS RAPE, CANNIBALISM, ABORTION, NECROPHILIA, GORE, ETC.

There is much to be said about a book that starts off complaining about fellatio.

(SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY)

Our main character is named… oh wait, he doesn’t have a name. No one ever refers to him by his name…and he is a bonified prick. His villain origin story is raping a drunk girl at a high school party, which led to her pregnancy and suicide after being forced to abort the baby by her boyfriend. (He doesn’t neglect to remind us that he took another go at her after her suicide.) The story starts off strong with sexual themes and grotesque imagery, the machinations of the mind of a necrophiliac. He clearly thinks very highly of himself and his acts and finds his victims through his place of employment. He works as a nighttime security guard working at a local hospital. While reasoning with the reader, he informs us that he is very intelligent and so is self-aware that his sexual proclivities are weird. However, he retorts with a line that I found interesting, “No cockroach ever desired to not be a cockroach, just because it knew it was a cockroach.”

The philosophical discussion on the self-awareness of cockroaches aside, knowing you’re a monster and desiring nothing else but to be that monster is depravity personified. He continues with our first sex scene, where he violates a recently deceased woman. Some of the wording here could be enough for you to throw up if you’ve recently ate. Descriptions like



“toenails sexily yellowed”

“pleading to be violated”

“cold dryness of her unlubricated vaginal canal”



… are enough to make your stomach curl. The sex scenes are horrifically detailed, think fifty shades of grey for necrophiliacs. During his nightly rounds, our “hero” meets another like him, someone who dabbles in the obscene. Dr. Heather Winchester, a maternity doctor who loves the taste of dead babies. He catches her in the act in his special place, the morgue. She is intrigued by him because he doesn’t freak out or report her for what he saw, so she comes to talk to him, where he ends up revealing his own secret.

Now, there is a bond forming. A cannibalistic Bonnie with her necrophiliac Clyde, so to speak. Yet, our guy is constantly fighting with himself. He intentionally treats Heather awfully because he doesn’t want to return to any sense of normalcy, which for him would be being attracted to a woman with a heartbeat.

The story doesn’t stop there, we have our friend telling a rape victim that he was going to rape their dead body (though in the story the victim Tamara liked this idea), his limits for perversity seem to be never-ending. Yet when see some out of character moments, like when he surprisingly helps a woman who was bleeding out in a car crash. This would be directly antithetical to his pessimistic attitude, in addition to the fact that he cock-blocked himself, as he realized she would have gone to his morgue if she would have died. Obviously, the story presents some complex themes amidst edgy shock value gore.

You have our protagonist’s struggle with adapting to society, his hatred for labels, and how he’s always struggled with being different. You have Helen’s struggle of childhood trauma, witnessing the death of her brother, mother, and pet ferret all in the same night. There is room in this story for empathy for these characters, that despite their grotesque acts you can feel for them. Our guy even tries to get you to think a little bit. He tells Helen that if you can’t cause harm to a dead body how is what they’re doing wrong?

I obviously do not think the author is arguing in favor of these acts, but I liked this point, nonetheless. Because when we discuss morality, a lot of default positions on it are “Well, as long as you don’t hurt anyone, you should be able to do whatever you want to do.” Now, you could argue that you’re still hurting the family/loved ones of the dead body you’re desecrating, and I think that’s a valid point to consider. However, I think our guy here pushes us into reconsidering societal expectations and how to think of a morality outside of the objective/subjective divide that we see in basic religious/political debates.

Basically, unless you want to bite the bullet and say Necrophilia/Cannibalism is okay as long as the victim is dead, you have to come up with a better argument.

But of course, with the good must also come the bad. There were a few things I didn’t like about this book. The husband of Helen reveal was too easy to predict and forced into the story, the treatment of Helen annoyed me, basically our guy abandoning her during her pregnancy, she has a miscarriage, and then commits suicide. Of course, our guy then desecrates her dead body with very violent sexual imagery (think of sex and eye sockets).

That being said, I think the humor of the last few pages and how he tied in earlier statements to the end was structured well. I also liked the real book recommendations made by the characters. If you can stomach it, I think this one is worth reading.… (plus d'informations)