Readers may absorb their environment a bit differently after reading Chuck Palahniuk's work. What was once beautiful may become a discomfort. What was once revolting may now have a unique quality worth appreciating. Pressing a fly against a bedroom window with the back of Palahniuk's "Stranger Than Fiction" would seem appropriate. Rather than wipe it with a tissue right away, regard the contrast of its fluorescent exterior against pale milky innards. Palahniuk can help to appreciate those moments.
"Stranger Than Fiction" is a collection of his non-fiction work. Those expecting to read another "Fight Club" or "Choke" will be a bit let down. In this work, he covers unique events across the country, documenting the odd little things people create in order to be with one another, to create company. He covers modern castle construction as a way for people to create solitude.
According to his introduction, Palahniuk finds the life of a writer to be a cycle of togetherness and seclusion. One must be with people to learn about them and away from them to analyze and interpret.
Some of the segments read like newspaper or magazine features. Others read like diary entries, depictions of happenings in his life. Insight into the life that created a scene of a cryogenically frozen baby being thrown across a room and shattered seems valuable. Let's not forget that the mother was chewing on glass in the corner.
Palahniuk also includes his portraits of a number of celebrities. He provides extensive interviews with Juliette Lewis ("Kalifornia," "Natural Born Killers") Marilyn Manson and a few people that you may have been unaware were famous. Like Rocket Guy. He was the first person to make and launch a personal rocket. Palahniuk details why he did it, how he came to this invention and what his past couple years have been like as Rocket Guy, a.k.a. Brian Walker.
Most Palahniuk fans are most interested in his ability to come up with stabbing one-liners that strike at the heart of the general disdain the average person feels, not his ability to write a par-level feature. His features certainly aren't bad. They just don't allow him the room to let his twisted mind wander, and it's his wanderings that make him brilliant.
So as the book alternates between feature articles and personal stories, it's half moderately interesting and half absolutely enthralling. It may be moderately interesting to read about amateur wrestlers competing to make the Olympics. It does offer him the chance to describe their cauliflower ears.
"It's like you've landed on some planet where almost everybody's ears are mangled and crushed, melted and shrunken. It's not the first thing you notice about people, but after you notice it, it's the only thing you see," he says.
At the end of his feature about life on a U.S. Navy sub, he describes what he was not allowed to talk about in his article. Like anal sex conducted between crew members.
"Oh, it happens," said a crew member, according to Palahniuk. "It happens a lot."
Palahniuk's words after revealing that tidbit are precious.
"Then he realized what he'd said. He'd acknowledged the invisible elephant. Every man in the room was glaring at him."
The best chapters are those in which Palahniuk chronicles moments of his own life. The month in which he took anabolic steroids and the way his testicles atrophied. The time he wanted to husk his ability to blend in, as a white man can.
"To be Whitie is to be wallpaper," he wrote.
He decided to run around downtown Seattle wearing a paper-mach?(c) dog head. Cops chase, punks throw rocks and pedestrians sneer. It's delicious.
The most telling chapter is his description of the effect of his father's 1999 murder. His mother and sister apparently had clairvoyant dreams the night of his murder, in which they spoke with the ex-husband and father.
"The night he died, I didn't have any dream. No one came to me in my sleep to say good-bye," Palahniuk says.
Such is the fascinating possibility of a non-fiction collection by Chuck Palahniuk. The reader gets to see if the jaded, "I am Jack's smirking revenge" author truly feels that way, or if it's a fabrication. Whether the grace of pure hopelessness is a way of life or just an interesting thought.
