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.
