Tag Archives: fiction

Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk was one of his earliest books, though it was initially rejected by publishers for its disturbing content. After the success of Fight Club, publishers came around to this sordid story about high fashion, a galaxy of pills, vaginoplasty, AIDS, a shotgun, and the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Program.

Our beautiful, unnamed narrator drifting around in a rental car with Seth Thomas and the queen supreme Brandy Alexander has a bit of an identity crisis going on: she’s missing half her face. A mysterious gunshot through her half-open car window led her to the hospital, where she lost her modeling job and her fiancé but was introduced to Brandy, a larger-than-life version of herself well on her way to becoming a woman.

The paragraphs within chapters jump abruptly from the past to the present, from the end to the beginning, and back and forth between what the future should have been and what we all wound up with instead. Our narrator compares reading her story to reading an article in a fashion magazine which makes you “Continue to Page ___.” “No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.”

This book has a considerable number of plot twists, even for a Palahniuk novel. If you pick this one up, just keep in mind: names change, uppers fade, and mascara runs, but you can only truly change if you challenge yourself more than you think you can bear.

My first Hercule Poirot mystery, I picked this up as a quick read while I figured out what my next big literary indulgence would be.

The book read quickly; as you can see, I did not.

This mystery novel is another great ensemble piece by Agatha Christie: a hard-nosed detective, a spy with his heart on his sleeve, a screaming typist, mysterious bodies (both breathing and not), a heap of peculiar neighbors, and of course, the armchair sleuth Poirot.

A shorthand typist is called to a woman’s home in an old Victorian neighborhood on a fairly normal afternoon. What she finds sets off a chain of inquests, questions, and even more murders. In a room with a dead body, a blind woman, and four mysterious clocks, the key to this murder isn’t in the complicated scene, but in the simplest of details.

After finishing American Gods, I quickly dove into The Ocean at the End of the Lane, also by Neil Gaiman. It is a charming, much shorter read than American Gods, though the mystery seems less precise. Gods is a gut-punch, a brain-bend, while Ocean is a sweet glance at supernatural worlds and the nature of memory. It reminded me very much of The Gates, which I read at Halloween, although instead of particle physics we are dealing with elusive magic which opens portals.

Lettie Hempstock is a strange eleven-year-old (who has probably been 11 for a very long time) who lives at the end of the lane where our unnamed narrator grew up. They share an incredible experience together, fraught with otherworldly creatures and ancient enchantments, but he finds himself with much different memories shortly thereafter. He forgets about her entirely until he finds himself at the end of that lane forty years later, escaping from a stuffy funeral reception. He sits by the duck pond there, which Lettie always called her ocean, and his childhood memories, vivid and frightening, come flooding back.

The story ultimately left me craving more, for there are many details left unexamined, unexplained — but the more I think on it, the more appropriate the absence of total clarity seems. The narrator is remembering his world as a 7-year-old, and there are many wonders that small children innately believe, instinctively do not question. The mystery is less precise, perhaps decidedly so. It  is certainly a book that draws a thick line between childhood and adulthood, of the things we try to remember and the things we lose forever. This is a great, quick read for a nostalgic evening.