Invisible Monsters | By Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters was recommended by one of my readers. @kjayteaa / Instagram

She knew I was a sometimes fan and recommended the book with these words:

“You’re either going to love this, or you’re going to fucking hate it.”

Isn’t that a truth of all things Chuck though? Said the sometimes fan.

I sat around for a few days after reading the book and really thought about the messages I had read and understood, the ones that weren’t blatantly obvious (see any tattoo of an IM quote) The ones that were beyond the story.

In Invisible Monsters Chuck tells you to let it all go.

What you have been programmed to think you need, you don’t.

You need to be shaken out of your mundane, mindless existence, where you distract yourself from how incredibly un–unique you are by focusing on the shit you buy and what you look like.

Wait – haven’t I read this book before?

About halfway through it dawned on me – I was reading a slightly different,

gender swapped,

confliction swapped Fight Club.

Both novels open with Chuck’s main character, both who remain nameless, both who have just been shot by an off screen character.

Now he’ll tell you how they got here.

Chuck likes to maim his characters to the point of no return. Bad enough so that they’ll be changed forever but they’ll live.

After I was sure that I had been essentially re-reading Fight Club I tried to see if I could deduce whether the sub characters were real or part of the mains psychosis. Like Fight Clubs sub characters – both show our nameless main how to destroy their life while simultaneously rebuilding it into what it should be.

Fight club though was half the size of Invisible Monsters – how could it touch on all of the same themes and messages? Fight Club got right to the point. There is so much reiteration in Invisible Monsters that I began to think I was re- reading pages. Scenes spelt out too much – so that the reader didn’t have to figure out connections – it read as simple as A-B-C.