Chuck Palahniuk is an interesting guy. Well, his novels are interesting, I don’t know the guy. Because some of the themes and subject matter in his books can be a bit hard to swallow sometimes, Palahniuk has been labeled as a nihilist by critics. I could see that I suppose, but that does not make me like his novels any less. Maybe it is the shock factor that he brings to literature that initially drew me in (Hey, we all stare at train wrecks don’t we?) but after I made it through the first grisly book, I realized that I really do like the guy’s minimalistic approach to writing. Palahniuk sticks to short words and simple sentences. His writing very much mimics the average person’s speech patterns. This minimalistic way of writing also helps to substantiate the characters in his stories to make them seem more real. With a few exceptions, Palahniuk’s characters are generally reminiscent of someone who has been marginalized by society or another force. His nobody characters come off as aggressive or self-destructive but often end up wrapped up in very philosophical deliveries, either from the characters themselves, or by the narrator. Palahniuk employs very cynical, black humor to the impossibly ironc scenarios that unravel through his books. Palahniuk often begins his novels at the end of the story so that the reader is left to discover how it was that this event came to be. Despite his raunchy, disturbing content, Palahniuk is still selling tons of books and maintaining more followers than critics. While his novels will never make Oprah’s book list, they are still pretty entertaining if your looking for something quick and a little out of the ordinary.
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