When the plot of your first novel partially hinges on anarchist overthrows funded by soap sales, and the narrative hook of your second work is the black box recorder of a jet moments away from slamming into the Australian outback, it stands to reason that your audience is going to be ready for anything. Which, to an author like Chuck Palahniuk, must sound like a challenge. Palahniuk's third identity crisis (that's "novel" to you), Invisible Monsters, more than ably responds to this call to arms. Set once again in an all-too-familiar modern wasteland where social disease and self-hatred can do more damage than any potboiler-fiction bad guy, the tale focuses particularly on a group of drag queens and fashion models trekking cross-country to find themselves, looking everywhere from the bottom of a vial of Demerol to the end of a shotgun barrel. It's a sort of Drugstore Cowboy-meets-Yentl affair, or a Hope-Crosby road movie with a skin graft and hormone-pill obsession, if you know what I mean. Um, yeah. Anyway, the Hollywood vibe doesn't stop these comparisons. As with Fight Club and Survivor, the book is invested with a cinematic sweep, from the opening set piece, which takes off like a house afire (literally), to a host of filmic tics sprayed throughout the text: "Flash," "Jump back," "Jump way ahead," "Flash," "Flash," "Flash." You get the idea. It's as if Palahniuk didn't write the thing but yanked it directly out of the Cineplex of his mind's eye. Does it succeed? Mostly. Still working on measuring out the proper dosages of his many writerly talents (equal parts potent imagery, nihilistic coolspeak, and doped-out craziness), Palahniuk every now and then loosens his grip on the story line, which at points becomes as hard to decipher as your local pill addict's medicine cabinet. However Invisible Monsters works best on a roller-coaster level. You don't stop and count each slot on the track as you're going down the big hill. You throw up your hands and yell, "Whee!" --Bob Michaels
This is a wild ride of a novel. The narrator is an unnamed fashion model who's had her lower jaw shot off in an ambush. In the hospital, she meets her new mentor, the Princess Brandy Alexander, who is in the middle of a year-long gender reassignment process. Together, they launch a picaresque voyage of revenge on the narrator's ex-best friend, model Evie, and ex-boyfriend, vice cop Manus, who were having an affair before the shooting. Along the way they pick up Sean, whom they are inexplicably feeding gender-altering pharmaceuticals without his knowledge. The novel opens with its climax, then jumps around the narrator's life, introducing her crazy parents, her ostensibly dead brother, and the nun-nurse who is trying to fix her up with other patients who have suffered disfiguring accidents. No one is who he or she seems to be, and the challenge is to figure out who is morphing into whom. By the end, most readers will be both exhausted and exhilarated. George Needham
From Kirkus Reviews
A macabre fantasy, in which a deformed model is guided by a drag queen down the yellow brick road of her past to the Emerald City of her futureall dreamed up by cult novelist Palahniuk (Survivor, 1998) in one of his more baroque moods. There is a certain point in all bedroom farces and comedies of errors when you give up trying to figure out whos who and just go along for the ride. That might be the wisest strategy here. Our narrator is one Shannon McFarland (although she doesnt actually introduce herself until the very end), and shes a real mess, quite literally: she was injured in a mysterious shooting and has lost her entire jaw and most of her face. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly?), Shannons brother Shane was also disfigured in a suspicious accident when he dumped a load of trash into the fire and a can of hair spray exploded in his face. Shane eventually turned gay and was thrown out of the house by his parents, who later learned that he had died of AIDS. Shannon grew up, became a supermodel, and got herself engaged to Manus, a vice-squad detective who ditches Shannon after her accident and takes up with Evie Cotrell, a rich Texas bimbo who used to be Shannons roommate and may have been a man early in her career. But never mind Evie; the one to watch is drag diva Brandy Alexander, who meets Shannon in the hospital and soon becomes her only friend. Brandy takes Shannon on the road, andalong with Brandys boyfriend Alfa Romeo, who in reality may be Manusthe two steal drugs from expensive homes by calling realtors and posing as potential buyers. Eventually, Shannon discovers that Brandy is not who she appears to be, but by then were ready for anything. Too clever by half: a Chinese box of a novel fascinating in its intricacies but pretty hard to get a grip on whole. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“[A] stylish, bitchy beach read.”
- Emily Jenkins, Village Voice
“?Invisible Monsters could scare the tights off the ratings board.... A wildly plotted, quick-read showcase of his hip, perverse humor and dark imagination.”
- Steve Sullivan, Cityview
“Palahniuk is either crazy or genius―his wildly inventive plotlines are from so far left field they might as well be lobbed from outer space; his language is quick and clever and impossibly honest and nasty (serrated, not graphic); his style―this time jumping through logical time like a nervous whippet―breaks all rules and conventions, like he never even learned them.... Invisible Monsters ?is a soap opera wrapped in a mystery; an enigma swaddled in a Bret Easton Ellis nightmare.”
- New City
“Fast-paced.... Everyone wants to be someone else, and in this hilarious book, they get the chance.”
- Ted Loos, Out
About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk is the best-selling author of more than seventeen fictional works, including Fight Club Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You and, most recently, Adjustment Day. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Audiobook
