Books › Dying Inside
Dying Inside
First published 1980 · 352 pages
A deeply intimate, melancholic portrait of a man slowly losing the one extraordinary thing about himself and facing the terrifying quiet of an ordinary mind.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like sitting in a dimly lit room with a brilliant but broken man as he confesses his deepest failures. It is a profoundly interior, meandering experience, driven not by plot but by the agonizing, slow-motion collapse of a unique mind. The prose is sharp, literary, and unsparingly honest, wrapping the reader in a claustrophobic yet deeply empathetic atmosphere of urban loneliness. You feel the crushing weight of too much connection giving way to the terrifying silence of absolute isolation. It will resonate deeply with readers who love character-driven, psychological science fiction that uses speculative concepts to explore the very human tragedies of aging, alienation, and the loss of self.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- somber
- lonely
- elegiac
- Tone
- melancholic
- cynical
- introspective
- confessional
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- aging and decline · loss of identity · the burden of empathy · urban alienation · isolation vs. connection
- The writing
- Literary, deeply interior, and articulate, tinged with a sharp, self-lacerating wit.
- The arc
- Moves from bitter denial and desperate clinging to a quiet, devastating acceptance of ordinary human isolation.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate character studies of flawed, aging protagonists and prefer science fiction that explores psychological landscapes rather than outer space.
Content notes
- depression
- isolation
- sexual content
- cognitive decline
About the book
From the back cover:
David Selig is outwardly unimpressive. His early promise as a student and scholar is unrealised. He has no proper job, he has no girlfriend. But, inside, Selig has the power of a god, for he can probe other people's minds and read their thoughts and feelings. This extraordinary faculty defines his sense of self -- his power is him. But with the onset of middle age, Selig's capacity to read minds is failing fast, and he must struggle to come to terms with that loss -- to accept that he is dying inside...
Description from Open Library.
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