C is for Chuck Palahniuk

 I heard about Chuck Palahniuk after watching Fight Club. I thought it was a good film with great actors; and a fantastic twist!

I discovered Fight Club was actually a book, so off I went in search, and I was hooked on the style, on the shape and form of the prose - and the much more realistic ending. Then I discovered that Fight Club wasn't actually his best book. I've read Invisible Monsters and Haunted (which I never completed - trying far too hard to be gory and becoming a parody of himself, sadly), but my absolute favourite is Diary.

Haunted, incidentally, is the novel that caused several men to faint at a reading as Palahniuk gave a graphic account of some damage to the male anatomy.
 

Chuck Palahniuk's Goodreads page

Diary is about a woman who always wanted to be an artist but never thought of herself as any good. She got married, had a daughter, acquired a pushy mother-in-law, and then her husband ends up in hospital in a coma. The flashbacks are really well-handled, in that they don't glare off the page, they flow with the rest of the story.

The plot jumps along at quite a pace, and I must admit, the idea of a man in a coma for the whole novel inspired a character in my latest novel MS. It also - much to my dismay, because I'm not sure how to recitfy it - leant itself to the tone of half of my novel, until a point where Palahniuk's voice fades out and mine appears. One of my betas who knows me very well actually noticed the change of voice, so I know it's obvious, and I know I can't attempt to sell a novel that's half written in someone else's voice. Especially a voice as obvious as Palahniuk's. But because it's so strong, and because it lends itself so well to that part of the novel I can't even re-write the first sentence - it's just so perfect the way it is!

I would add that if you're going to check him out on my recommendation, go for some earlier stuff. The repeated hooks - almost refrains - that I thought worked well in Fight Club and Diary are used to excess later on. Maybe he thought because it worked in a couple of novels it would work in them all! Actually, I may have more mixed feelings about Palahniuk than I thought!

My aim of this post wasn't to advertise, but coincidentally...
C is also for Cat and the Dreamer, my new novella.
Please feel free to check out the links on the top of the left-hand column :-)
Thank you!