Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Chuck Palahniuk - Greener Pastures
You can't read this book. Scraped from Substack metadata it looks like there's only a few dozen people who have.
How very elitist.
In his most obscurely ambitious project yet, Chuck delivers the ultimate tease. In an effort to distribute fiction too edgy for publishers, Chuck took to Substack and over the course of a year released a weekly serial which culminated in this novel he's now removed the platform.
It's his short story Zombie spliced together with tones of Fight Club and sprinkled with his aging, disgruntled malaise about corporations trafficking the aspirations of America's up and coming generation.
How very petty.
Greener Pastures is a global cabal hunting for kids likely to make seismic shifts in culture and technology in order to weed them out. The first line of defense is to short-circuit their lives, and if you can't get them addicted or pregnant or crippled, you place them in some high-status bureaucratic dead end job, warehousing them, mothballing each until their passion and creativity no longer pose a threat.
This is all an effort to preserve the status quo. Those who held power would always hold power so there would never be another Renaissance or Industrial Revolution.
Somehow, Chuck is whittling this down by about a third and sending it to print. Maybe next year. For now, I might be the only person, save Chuck's editor and publisher, who possesses a copy of this book. Being on Substack every week a chapter was released, I exported each installation and collated and converted it into an ebook for personal use.
How very dastardly.
With a heavily cult audience, me being a high-ranking member, could you expect anything less? I'll let everyone else wait for the paperback release because distribution is the only type of IP infringement with any real recourse. Or I guess we'll see.
Greener Pastures is gory, lewd, insightful, exposing, depressing. Elitism wrings the world's resources and leaves the leftovers for the rest of us. A story as old as us.