Once you invade someone’s dreams, you’re a part of them forever. For the rest of their life, they’ll be spitting out little pieces of you.
I wrote those words, but I didn’t dream of Chandler Morrison until years later. He messaged me one evening that his cancer had metastasized in his spine, and he didn’t know if he was going to live.
I dreamed that night of meeting him in a dark bedroom on the edge of the world. He lay on his deathbed underneath a trembling slice of moonlight, hooked up to machines, his skin disintegrating into his ribs.
I lay on the bed beside him in pure quiet. Each breath seemed to be a miracle. I waited in apprehension at his fluttering pulse.
He lit a cigarette and smoked it with what was left of his breath. When our eyes met, he laughed.
He told me, “Don’t be afraid for me. I know what I signed up for.”
I didn't believe in the power of dreams back then. Spitting out little pieces of you. That was just something I wrote because it sounded cool. Stories weren’t real life, and neither were dreams.
They were noise and random bits of data, a Technicolor glitch. They didn't mean anything, right?
***
I first became aware of Chandler Morrison when a friend recommended his book, Just to See Hell. I blew him off at first because the book had a cover that looked like it was made in MS Paint, and I didn’t want to read more extreme horror from a young male writer. Most of it bored me. They had plenty of rage and trauma but none of the experience or sophistication to put it into context.
“Just read it,” my friend urged me. “I think you two would get along.”
So I downloaded the book.
A week later, my Facebook blew up with a scandal that happened at that year’s BizarroCon. A writer had done a performance based on his then-upcoming book, Dead Inside, at the Bizarro Showdown. It allegedly made several people upset enough to cry and run from the room. He was banned from the convention for life, and his book contract was canceled.
His name?
Chandler Morrison.
I’ll admit it made me curious. One night, I gave the book a chance and told myself I’d read just one story.
The story was about what I expected - angry and a bit immature, with over-the-top, violent manifestations of his pain. I almost put my Kindle down and gave up.
But despite myself, I felt compelled to continue reading.
And I kept reading.
There was a raw talent in those stories, a tender and unrelenting passion. Even when Chandler expressed performative apathy, his words burned with emotion. He clearly worked at his craft.
I got to the story “Somewhere Between Screaming and Crying.” All of the elements he’d been working with came together. He dug underneath his rage and sadness and found something to say about the human condition. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good.
I knew I had to reach out to him.
***
American Narcissus appeared in my inbox a few years ago.
“Do your worst, cruel mistress,” Chandler wrote when he asked for my feedback.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I read the book. He told me the plot one Friday night over the phone while I swung on a swing set alone in the dark. Still, I’d been drinking Mexican martinis, and I was more interested in arguing with him about the meaning of the themes in Revolutionary Road.
Chandler hated the idea of being a horror writer and wanted to escape the stigma of being the guy who wrote about sex with corpses and eating babies. He’d never expected Dead Inside to be popular or to be so central to his reputation. American Narcissus was supposed to break him out of the genre box he’d been consigned to.
I read the entire book in one day while curled up in bed with my phone. A part of me wanted to hate it, to live up to my reputation as difficult to please, but Chandler’s unrelenting voice shone through. It always compelled me to continue reading, but he’d dramatically improved in this book. This wasn’t the kid who wrote Dead Inside and stories about men mutilating themselves with cheese graters.
Not anymore.
He’d emerged on the other side of his cancer a different person. He’d tamed his anger and his spastic flailing against life. He polished his style to a sharp point. American Narcissus was the closest he’d gotten to the book he was meant to write.
***
Years ago, Chandler and I hung out in a shitty Airbnb in Silver Lake, the kind that had been obviously bought by a mass corporation pretending to be a quaint couple - complete with placeholder pictures in their frames.
Chandler sat on the couch with his skinny limbs folded up. He was going through radiation therapy. His eyes were worn with exhaustion, but he never once complained.
He told me about the book he was writing (That later became Along the Path of Torment) while I sat across from him on the bed and sipped from a pint of Jack Daniel’s. It could have been his last book before he died, but neither of us discussed that. He’d hate my pity. In his eyes, it would make him something lesser.
He laughed a little when he described one of the more uncomfortable parts of the book, as if embarrassed about saying it aloud. It would’ve been easy to dismiss him as a shock jock or an edge lord, but I knew when he laughed like that, he was moved to write by a compulsion inside him. He wasn't just performing. He needed to write, regardless of how people viewed him.
If you look at Chandler from a certain angle, he appears fragile. But many writers would’ve folded up and disappeared if they had to endure what Chandler did. They write because they like the idea of being a writer, because they want to get invited to parties where they can filter their image through the lens of a writerly aesthetic. It’s difficult for an illusion like that to survive the brunt force of reality.
But Chandler just is a writer. A part of him persists despite his self-destructive tendencies. It burns like the fire in the furnace that transforms iron into steel.
***
Chandler Morrison isn’t real. He’s an archetype, a wild animus. He’s one part Bret Easton Ellis, one part Hank Moody from Californication, and a little bit of Roland from The Dark Tower (At least in how he dresses). He’s the millennial composite of nihilism and trauma, a backlash against earnest optimism with a dash of style. He's a demon, a dream invader. He's the promise that you can hold your pain close to you like a precious gem, that the cathedral to emptiness would welcome you if you forsake meaning.
We met David Duchovny once at the L.A. book festival, and when Chandler told him that his look was partially based on Hank Moody from Californication, David said, “I don’t know if I'd go around telling people that, man.”
I was four months pregnant at the time and feeling a little out of place. I clutched my copy of David Duchovny’s book, The Reservoir, to my stomach and tried to think of disappearing.
David saw Chandler's boots and said they didn't suit Hank’s style. Chandler sneered. “Yeah, I didn't say it inspired my entire look. Don't flatter yourself.”
That's Chandler. At a moment, he could swing from thoughtful to arrogant, gentle to capricious. He reveled in his theatrical narcissism and refused to revere even the sources that he derived meaning from. It never even belonged to them in the first place. It always belonged to him.
And even when it did belong to him, that didn’t mean it was precious. Even Chandler Morrison was subject to the caricaturization of his satire, like in his book Human-Shaped Fiends, where he flattened himself into a silly, desperate, womanizing wunderkind.
Nobody escaped his scathing attention. Especially not himself.
Once, we sat together at a wine bar with another friend and he gave a beleaguered sigh and said, “It’s so difficult to be famous.” Another time, we walked through a Marshall’s and he wrung his hands and said he felt sick and was “worried he was going to catch something.” You know it’s just part of the illusion, a bit, but he leans into the character with such conviction you have to wonder if he even knows he’s a character anymore.
Of course, there’s a person separate from the writer, but even if you're looking at him, you'll probably never see him. You're not supposed to. Like the faces of Janus, spinning so fast you’ll never witness the two of them separated.
***
My god. I'm turning into a Chandler Morrison character. I found myself one night sitting on the bathroom floor, taking nude selfies of myself while crying. I wanted to make sure I still looked beautiful when I was sad. I even put on a pair of Persol sunglasses (Like the kind his protagonist, Helen Troy, wore in #thighgap) to hide my red eyes.
I laughed at the absurdity of it, how much I'd hate telling him I even thought of it. It wasn't like his ego needed to get any bigger.
Maybe I'd spent so long immersed in Chandler's work, over the years of knowing him, that it'd transformed me upon touch. I let it infiltrate my dreams, and now it'd infiltrated my reality.
But what did it mean to become a Chandler Morrison character? Chandler once said, “All my characters are beautiful, rich, and miserable,” but there's more to it than that.
American Narcissus is a beautiful tragedy, and all tragedies are stories of fate. A tragic character refuses to understand or address their shortcomings, and so moves themselves toward doom, step by purposeful step, without ever realizing they're the corrupting element.
I pulled out of my own perspective to see how silly I was being. From a far enough vantage point someone's worst tragedy could appear funny, fodder to be used in a story.
I deleted the pictures, wiped away my tears, and climbed into bed.
***
Chandler Morrison still comes to me in dreams.
I’ll see him on the edge of a city after a nuclear fallout, weeping over dead animals. Or he’ll be in an L.A. nightclub, two anorectic fur-draped sisters clinging to him, as he always moves just out of my vision. Sometimes, he stands in all black at the end of the hallway in my house, smoking a cigarette. The darkness warps his head, and his face appears like static. Even though his appearance is frightening, with a darkened tone, I’m never afraid of him.
It’s rare to meet someone who becomes a voice inside you. Someone that your subconscious recognizes as a part of you.
But everyone needs their demons, and he’s one of mine.