Chucky

I have a very unlady-like guilty pleasure and his name is Chuck Palahniuk. To celebrate the release of his new book Rant (which I’m dying to read but haven’t bought yet), I’ll tell you a bit more about the guy and why I like, make that love him.

The first book of his I ever read was Lullaby. My girly side was immediately drawn to the intriguingly flashy cover. On the back it read: “Carl Streator is a reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for a soft-news feature. After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It's a 'culling song' - an ancient African spell for euthanizing sick or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude sonofabitch that gets in their way.” Needless to say, I immediately bought it and finished it the same weekend. I’ve been hooked ever since.

All his novel are so absurd and so out there that not a lot of people can get away with it. His stories are cynical, action packed and incredibly original adrenaline rushes filled with ironic black humor. Probably not everyone’s cup of tea seeing as psychology and setting take the backdrop to dialogue and plot. He has a very minimalist approach to writing using a limited vocabulary and short sentences to mimic the way that an average person telling a story would talk.

The characters are usually people who have been marginalized in one form or another by society, and who react with often self-destructive aggressiveness. He also attempts to comment on current problems in society, such as materialism and this is one of the reasons that his novels have been called satirical horror stories.

This mix of humor and the bizarre events around which these stories revolve resulted in Palahniuk being sometimes labeled as a "shock writer" by the media. But he has attained a well deserved top spot alongside contemporaries like Brett Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland, who I both also love.

This is pure entertainment all the way and also the reason why half of his novels are optioned to become movies with already one incredible predecessor, one of my all time favorites: Fight Club. Fight Club is a classic example of his novels wacky, funny, often violent, sometimes sexist but so mind-boggling original nature. Ranging from the hilariously camp Invisible Monsters to the horrifying, mind-blowing and stomach-churning Haunted (the list goes on), they will have you on the edge of your seat gasping for air and loving every minute of it.

It may not be literature with a capital L, but does it always need to be?