Chuck Palahniuk

This is where Goodreads needs negative numbers to score with. Chuck fucking Palahniuk OWES me stars simply for spending hard-earned cash on this steaming pile of dogshit.

Chuck has written three of my favourite novels. One is [book:Lullaby|22206], one is [book:Rant|22285], and one is [book:Fight Club|5759]. And yes, I read the novel before I saw the movie. He had some other books in between that I also enjoyed a fair amount, but then, things started to get a touch weird. [book:Haunted|22288], show more while having some great stuff in it, overall was a miss for me. But when he then proceeded to lube himself up with Crisco then swan-dived into the festering, hemorrhoid-laden anal cavity that was [book:Pygmy|4601396], a book that was virtually unreadable and incredibly stupid. After that, ol' Chuck just seemed to try and out-Chuck himself. And, having at one time thought of him as one of my top five favourite writers, he fell completely off my radar, and I swore I was done reading him.

Then he decides to follow up his finest work with a sequel. Well hell, I have to break my rule for that, right? I mean...this is Fight Club we're talking here.

Of course, I did not embark upon this journey without some trepidation.

Still, the cover art by the amazing Mack helped to allay my fears, as did the excellent interior art by Cameron Stewart. And, for the first couple of chapters or issues of this ten-issue run, things were going okay. Yes, the world of Fight Club is a messed up one, so I was ready for a little confusion, a little messiness. I can say I actually enjoyed the first two chapters.

But then, by chapter four? Yeah, the shit was beginning to pile up.

Around chapter seven, I actually stopped reading and said to myself, "It's like this fucking story was written by someone with ADD." Palahniuk wasn't just bouncing from scene to scene, the scenes were bouncing panel by panel, and the story was spiraling so far out of the realistic, it blew right past probable, then improbable, said fuck you to plot holes as it jetted by, and ended up in the nether regions of brain-damaged meets bad fan fiction.

Then it got worse.

It got meta.

Oh yeah, Palahniuk, having long ago run out of not just good ideas, but even bad ideas, decided to mine the truly horrible idea of not just throwing himself into the story as the author writing it as we read it, but having him interact both with the characters and his Write Club.

And then he drew the half-assed ending out for pages and fucking pages. This is where that shit that had been piling up reached its tipping point and began its landsliding onslaught on everything that made the original Fight Club such a mind-blowing reading experience.

Words cannot express how deeply I despise this shockingly, stunningly bad pile of shit. The rating is 35 stars for all the art and colour and lettering and effort by everyone other than Palahniuk to make this a story worth reading, and -34 stars for his effort in spreading his ass cheeks and dropping a Cleveland steamer all over that effort.

I will never read anything by this author again. Ever. Because, as far as I'm concerned, he's forgotten how to be one, and should be stripped of rights to author anything, be it a novel, a script, or a blog post.

Palahniuk, you were once gifted. Now, you just suck. show less

i am Chuck’s Anticivilization Catharsis.

we want numbly the breakdown of all that holds us to civilized behavior. we are trapped in this mundane life and live so far from our biology that we have ceased to thrive. we feel it and we don’t. we long for free air where our moves aren’t second-guessed and judged round the clock but aren’t sure why our frustration smolders.

Palahniuck offers a release valve for this impacted rage in the form of a compelling vision of a would-be revolution show more against the fundamentals of modern Western culture. no more wage slavery, no more taxation, no more PTO, fossil fuels. just realize we are crud on the shoe of the universe and take us back to the Garden, please, where we can don the mantle of Noble Savage once again and live happily “stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.”

the movie? a masterpiece. as a book adaptation? spot on. it captures the atmosphere of the book and delivers the message without flinching. i think that had Fincher watered the message down, Hollywood might have been short a pair of testicles in under 5 minutes.

back to the book: succinct and truthful, tidbits of remotely associated knowledge fatten the prose: demolition, soap-making, medical refuse, posh catering, secret subliminal film splicing, attending support groups for fun-- it’s all here. the world as is. no varnish. intriguing and full of decomposing life.

i am Chuck’s Buddhist Vision.

my copy of the book was obtained from a library booksale. it had been chewed by something with teeth leaving a hole in the cheek of the book, like a hanging chad. there were also several mangled or missing pages that i had to splice in from a whole copy from the library. now, the book in which i invested creaks and groans, pops and crunches, and wants to open itself to those replaced and poorly copied pages. feels a little like Project Mayhem.

my copy of Fight Club is perfect. show less

Despite the authors opening, I read it and I cannot be more confused about myself as a person for loving this book.
Something about Chuck Palahniuk has me disgusted and enthralled. He's on a cusp of mental horrors covered with a blanket of sarcastic humor.

"We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."

The story is about Victor, a sex addict only attending sex addicted anonymous groups to scope out partners, trying to pay for the show more care of his mother with Alzheimer's at a nursing home. His mother has a diary that she claims that she had Victor by Jesus's foreskin, making him a descendent of Jesus. Like many of the authors characters Victor is cynical, pathetic, and nihilistic. Even though she wasn't a very good mother, victor often having flashbacks of the abuse, he still wants to make sure she is taken care of. So he comes up with a scheme. He purposefully chokes on food in restaurants waiting for an unfortunate soul to "save his life". These people then feel obligated to send him money, gifts on holidays, or send him things just because. show less

I have always known this title to be a cult classic and now I see why- I don’t know why it took me so long to read it, though. This is one of those books where you might be hungry and you really have to pee but nothing can peel your eyes away from the page and you’re definitely not getting up anytime soon. When I started reading I didn’t know anything about the plot besides “the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club,” and honestly that made this experience show more SO much better, because I was not expecting the ending in any way shape or form. Because I didn’t know what to expect, I got to be amazed. I don’t know if I could actually handle the movie without fainting, but I think the book lived up to the legacy. show less