Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
I just finished up Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. He’s best known for authoring Fight Club, but I’ve also read Choke and Lullaby. His Invisible Monsters is next on the list after I finish the book I’m currently on.
If you haven’t read Palahniuk before, be warned – he’s different. His characters and style remind me of what I saw in Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, with the minor exception that I don’t put down a Palahniuk book after a couple dozen pages…
The first thing that struck me as odd about Survivor was that the pages and chapters were numbered backwards – page one was the last page. If you think about it, a numbering scheme like this is good indicator of what you have left until completion of the book, but I found it annoying as it made measuring the accomplishment of how many pages I’d completed impossible.
The main character of Survivor is a former member of a cult-like religious organization whose remaining members have mostly all been recently killed or committed suicide. As was custom for all but the first born child, when he came of age, the character was released from the organization to work as a servant and cleaner for a rich couple outside the bounds of the organization. Since he’s the last remaining member of the organization, the character becomes a media celebratory. Soon after, he’s traveling the country at the whim of his producer, promoting anything and everything you could slap his name on. I couldn’t help but think of Cake’s Comfort Eagle throughout the whole book.
Just prior to leaving his job as a servant, he meets a girl whose brother he talked into suicide after having received a phone call from him at his house. His number had been accidentally posted in a suicide prevention hot line ad ad couple years previously, but he enjoyed having the power to sway people’s decisions on death so much he later started intentionally posting it all over town.
The girl possesses physic abilities, which the character uses to promote himself even more. Constant travel and the drugs & treatments required to maintain his status as a celebratory slowly wear the character down & the story then slides toward his death. (It starts on his death, so I’m not ruining anything.)
Twisted, dark & humorous – a quick & excellent read in my eyes. As with the other Palahniuk books I’ve read, I couldn’t pull myself away from it and raced to the end to see how twisted and far fetched Palahniuk could make the story and characters.