I've only gone to one place mentioned in this book because it was in this book. That place is Antique Powerland...it is the coolest place in Oregon. Thank you Chuck! ( )

As a city I love Portland, and I think I love it more because of this book. I wish every big city had Chuck Palahnuik to write a guide for it. I haven't finished this yet because I want to get it done right before I go back for a visit. So far, a tight little book with a beautiful map on the inside cover. Great, bizarre stories with some creepy things you just don't want to know about.

the only book worth reading by Palahniuk...unusual places to visit in Portland, Oregon ( )

Lately I have been considering a move to the other Portland, the one in Oregon with more culture and less snow. The first book I could find about P/O was Fugitives and Refugees by Chuch Palahniuk. It did not inflame my desire to pull up stakes.

Palahniuk specializes in gross, scary, oddball, grotesque fiction: Fight Club, Haunted, et cetera. So naturally his take on P/O is full of stuff you wouldn't want your mom to see. Here are all the sex clubs! Here's where I threw my tonsils out a window! Here are all the supposedly haunted old buildings! Here are the drag queens! Here's the underground tunnel where a performance artist threw a "fetus" at me!

To be fair, Palahniuk does throw in a healthy amount of info on eateries, gardens, zoos, et cetera. And his beyond-the-fringe style can be very vivid, as a true tale about a mother tending her dying son attests. But all in all, Palahniuk left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to live in the underbelly, thanks.

Chuck Palahniuk's nonfiction is so drastically different from his fiction that, if it weren't for the comfort and confidence of his voice, you'd think they were two totally different authors.

In this book, he tries his hand at something akin to a travel guide in a surprisingly firm sense: he takes us to various spots in Portland, often elaborating for pages when he's got a great story to tell, but willing to settle on a mere paragraph when all he wants is for you to take notice. Interspersed with these sightseeing suggestions are "postcards," short autobiographical interludes of his own twisted history in Portland that add a personal insight to some of the demented destinations he takes us to.

And while most of the stops he suggests are far from the kind of extreme things you'll see in Fight Club or Haunted, they are just off the beaten path enough to raise a few eyebrows. Yet Palahniuk treats all of them with a tone that is equal parts journalistic detachment, fascination, and genuine interest, turning them not into a catalog of freaks but simply an eclectic set of destinations that are treated with far more respect than they are revulsion.

It is this smoothness of delivery that makes what could have been an otherwise mundane or macabre text become something truly intriguing and compulsively readable.