Book Review: Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

By Sarah Schiavoni

Heading home for some sort of school break some time ago—spring, summer, Thanksgiving...who knows?—I complained to my boyfriend that I didn’t have anything new to read. He offered me Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, and explained that this was the guy who did Fight Club, a phenomenal movie that I hadn’t realized was first a book. Having enjoyed that movie, I was eager to see what Palahniuk’s books were all about. What I found were crazy plot twists, quirky characters, insane stunts, and more. Since then, whenever I’m in a bookstore, I peruse his books and often pick up another to add to my growing collection. The other week, I grabbed Invisible Monsters, attracted to its cover: a black and white picture of a woman’s head with a splash of neon pink splattered across her mouth. Like the three or four Palahniuk books I’ve read before it, I raced to get to the end, stumbling over the twists and turns as they came.

Invisible Monsters opens with a chaotic scene: a house is on fire, Evie Cottrell stands screaming on the staircase, and Brandy Alexander lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, asking the narrator to tell her life story. What occurs after is a series of non-linear stories in which the reader slowly learns about the characters and the circumstances by which they’ve become what they are. The narrator, a former model, unnamed until Brandy gives her a new identity, suffered from what appeared to be a freak accident that left her face mutilated--that made her an “invisible monster.” She hides her face behind veils and sets off on an adventure with Brandy, a pill-popping transsexual, and Manus, her ex-lover, that leads her back to Evie. The story is confusing, sarcastic, odd, and sometimes too graphic, but it kept me on the edge of my seat as I learned more and more about the intricate connections between the characters and the events that have shaped them.

Palahniuk brilliantly leaks out information in his books, slowly explaining the behind-the-scenes of the story but still completely surprising the reader at the end of the book. His interesting writing and the odd characters and events he describes make his books nearly addictive. If you like intense, unique stories, I highly recommend reading Invisible Monsters and all of his other books.