I sit here today, very near the end of Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. I'm dying. I don't want to finish it. That would mean the affair with this amazing writer is, for the time being, over. I can't bear to let him go.
"When I started writing, I said my goal was to bring people back to reading, people who had given up on reading. So I wrote for people who didn't read at that point. Today, you have to write books that can compete against video games and music videos and professional wrestling and all the other things people can do with their time. And those people want plot. People don't want stasis and description. They want the plot to move, they want lots of verbs. You know, verbs on top of verbs." Courtesy of Powells.com Interviews
Chuck is the first author to bring back my love of reading so hard and heavy that I'm standing in the grocery line giggling softly to myself. I'm in the bathtub, a wrinkled prune in now freezing water, not realizing that hours have passed.
Chuck Palahniuk, whose (somewhat literally) explosive first novel, Fight Club, struck more nerves with the nation's angry young men than a trip to a sociopathic dentist. ..Abercrombie and Fitch Interview
August 14th, 2001 News
I went with my ex-husband and some friends to see Fight Club the night it was released. Then I bought it on DVD when it was out. I had no idea there was more from this ingenious man.
Then.....it happened. Someone handed me a copy of Survivor.
In went my nose and it's been stuck in his intriguing, insane and gripping world for the past 2 weeks. I finished Survivor and ran out and picked up Choke. Picked up Fight Club just to see how it went in the text only version. Then on to Invisible Monsters. I have fallen asleep with this every night. Awakened to find it greeting me every morning.
I am about to bid a very sad farewell to this beautiful intellectual orgy. I am broken hearted and I feel slighly lost. The sun will rise tomorrow and all I will have are the memories.
My will to go on is only aided by this excerpt I found while searching for more to feed my lust for Chuck's writing....
LULLABYE
Publisher:
Doubleday
Release Date: September, 2002 (tentative)
What it's About: A newspaper reporter is investigating sudden infant death syndrome for a soft-news feature. After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It's a "culling song -- an ancient African spell for euthanizing sick people or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself killed his own wife and child with the same poem, accidentally, twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude sonofabitch that gets in their way. It's a comedy/drama/tragedy. In that order."
More: September 2002 may be a long way to wait for Lullaby's release... but by then, Chuck says he'll already have two more horror novels written, as part of a trilogy he has planned.
Courtesy of chuckpalahniuk.net
I'm looking forward to more invigorating hours of mind fucking pleasure provided by this man. I also plan on seeing if he will be in my area for a book signing in the near future. In the meantime, I will try to drag out this last few pages I have left, although I think my will to put it down will be quite weak.
I see in my future a meeting...Twelve Step Program for Recovering Chuck Palahniuk Addicts....Or perhaps I don't want to be cured. Ever.