Chuck Palahniuk, "Invisible Monsters"
First of all, can you really have good expectations for a book that starts with the dedication, “To my editor, who kept saying, ‘This is not good enough.’”?
Second, as a warning, if you have not read, or at the very least, seen the movie version of Fight Club, what I say here may not make a whole lot of sense. You should have been paying attention.
For those not familiar with the book-publishing world, a lot of people never get past writing that first book. It seems like a weird concept to me. After all, getting the first book written and published seems like it would be the hardest part, though what would I know about that?
After that first novel, you have a base to fall back on; you have a foot in the door. But I guess a lot of people only have one good story in them, and they then drift off into obscurity. We have a rule at the bookstore to not buy an author’s first work, unless they’ve already published a second or third novel.
Palahniuk seems determined not to be a one trick pony, and since Fight Club’s success in 1996 he’s written at least three other books that I know of. Like I said, he’s determined to not be a one trick pony. The problem is, Invisible Monsters is really just a re-working of Fight Club, this time having the lead character be an ordinary girl suddenly convinced to do outrageous and outlandish things by a enigmatic person with whom she has a chance meeting. Along the way they shun materialistic possessions while building an underground network of sorts.
Sound familiar? It should if you’ve read or seen Fight Club. It does move in slightly different directions along the way, but I kept making comparisons with how his first novel was structured. In fact, I was able to make many more comparisons than I should have been able to.
Still though, it’s not half-bad and if I hadn’t noticed all the similarities, this would have held up much better on its own. The novel Choke, released in 2001 doesn’t suffer from such similarities, but in all honesty, that book just isn’t very good.
Palahniuk, in my view, better think of a new trick pretty soon, or it soon won’t matter how many books he writes — because nobody is going to be willing to publish them.
