It won't seem like this from what I'm about to say, but Palahniuk is a great writer. In Survivor, a story that reconstructs the events leading up to a cultist hijacking a plane, his prose is so distinctively sardonic and depressive and identifiably originative of the maladapted dudecore genre it later spawned that just reading it gives you a little lightbulb moment -- ah, so is where it all began!
Yes, I know Fight Club came first. That's actually my problem with this (even though I haven't read it and only watched the Fincher adaptation), because my experience reading Survivor was pretty much identical to my experience watching Fight Club. We start out really, really strong out the gate. The first half is hilarious and impossible to put down. Chucky's a genius! Then the book (as with the movie) diffuses into a million different directions and he's lost me. The things that happen stop making the same sense and then the magic is gone and the only thing that keeps me reading (or watching) is the vain hope that he'll reach those highs again. Palahniuk's a victim of his own edginess; it really feels like he can't help but keep pushing the envelope for whatever reason (desire for social commentary? high on his own farts and thinks he can pull it off?).
I looked up some more of his stuff on the library computer today and the descriptions of them gave me the impression that once you've read one, you've read them all. I know I'm making a lot of assumptions here so I'm probably not being very fair.
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