Reading matters

'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction - hardcover; Jonathan Cape; 336 pages; 2007. REVIEW COPY.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favourite authors. He has a distinctive, often experimental, style that mixes black humour with scathing satire. The result is often a very funny, completely surreal, rollicking good read. But his new novel -- subtitled The Oral History of Buster Casey -- fails to deliver the usual offbeat and inspired narrative I have come to expect.

Rant is essentially a story about a now-dead wayward weirdo -- Buster L "Rant" Casey -- who is responsible for an urban plague of rabies and other "pranks" across America. It is set in a technologically advanced dystopian future in which people are separated into two distinct groups -- daytimers and nighttimers.  The nighttimers, who come out when it is dark, spend a large proportion of their time Party Crashing. This is a sport in which participants deliberately cause car accidents in a rather destructive and surreal version of a demolition derby.

'Survivor' by Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 289 pages; 1999

This is typical Palahniuk fare: surreal, outlandish and completely over-the-top.

This oh-so brilliant satire on fame and religion is a gripping read from the first word.

'Invisible Monsters' by Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 304 pages; 2000

There's nothing quite as surreal as immersing yourself in a Chuck Palahniuk book. He takes imagination to a whole new level, let me tell you. Invisible Monsters is no exception. There's enough quirky, eccentric, off-beat characters to fill an entire universe in this one.

But seriously, this is a brilliant novel full of complicated and unexpected twists and turns (although I did guess the main one well before it was revealed). It's set in the bitchy, I'm-a-bigger-whore-than-you fashion world and tells the story of a fallen glamour model who had her face horribly disfigured in an "accident" and is no longer able to speak. She hooks up with her new best friend, Brandy Alexander, and tries to start her life afresh.

The narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time (a recurrent Palahniuk trick used in his other novels), which serves to disorientate the reader in much the same way you imagine that the drugs the characters scoff throughout the story disorientate them. But because this author is such a skilled writer he deftly weaves the strands together so that you never seen the joins. And once you understand (and get used) to his literary style you immediately fall in love with it and wish you'd invented it before him.

All in all, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

'Diary' by Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 272 pages; 2004

London's Time Out magazine described this as "Part Rosemary's Baby, part the Wicker Man", which is to say it's creepy and nihlistic, shocking and disturbing.

Personally, I think a more apt description for Diary is Stephen King's Misery meets Peter Weir's The Truman Show.

Palahniuk, who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors, has written a wonderfully entertaining novel that gripped me from start to finish.

'Choke' by Chuck Palahniuk

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 293 pages; 2002

To be honest, I bought this book on the strength of it's opening line: "If you're going to read this, don't bother." This wry tone lasts throughout the entire novel, which is at times laugh-out-loud funny, though the humour is about as black as it comes.

There's a lot of explicit sex in it, which isn't surprising given that the main character, Victor Mancini, is a recovering sex addict.