Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk – Hungover & Dissatisfactory
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
And I finally meet a Chuck Palahniuk book that I don’t like. Fight Club set the bar, Snuff exceeded it and now Invisible Monsters brings me crashing down again.
The stream-of-consciousness that worked well as a writing technique in Fight Club goes all over the place in this book and gives you a bad headache as you struggle to figure what’s being said, who’s saying it and if the whole thing is just imagination or nostalgia. Also, the extreme language and ideas that gave us adrenalin rushes in his other books just feels forced and stretched here.
I gave up on the book midway and only persisted because this is a writer I’m collecting and want to have read all major books of. The plot drags on in a self-absorbed delirium for the better part of the book and then suddenly ends in a half-assed, too much to be plausible way. It’s as if Palahniuk just scribbled a whole lot of random nonsense while under the influence, then woke up with a terrible hangover and a deadline, finished off in whatever he could cull together in the last hour and set it off to be printed.
Don’t waste your time on Invisible Monsters unless, like me, you have a perverse book deathwish. I guess anybody who enjoys Palahniuk beyond a couple of pages would.
