Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor
“Testing, testing. One, two, three. Testing, testing. One, two, three. Maybe this is working. I don't know. If you can even hear me, I don't know. But if you can hear me, listen.”
When the Flavor-Aid (since most people incorrectly) ascribe Kool-Aid to the Jim Jones massacre) spares the sole surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult's mass suicide, Tender Branson embarks on one hell of a Rumspringa as he ventures out into the real world. He gardens for the elite. Sabotages a suicide hotline by enabling its depressed callers.
When the PR world finds out who he is, they glam him up as a celebrity. Chuck digs at the media-made messiah transformation hollywood celebrities go through to reinvent themselves for fame: steroids, implants, fake bakes, endowing him with an agent who secures him a book contract, a movie deal, an arranged marriage.
It's satire at its best. Black fantasy. Taboo humor. Poking at the problems of society with the edgy and harsh critique we've all come to love in a Palahniuk book.
As with all his best books, what makes Chuck stand out is how he experiments with prose. Survivor is a long suicide note voiced from the remains of a black box as he hijacks an empty 747. It starts on page 274 and ends on page 1, and there are very few literary or transgressive authors with the clout and moxie to pull this style off. Not once, but every. single. time.
Reminiscent of the book's themes, its cover features a man crucified over an aerial view of a plane. The same image I have pressed onto two t-shirts I'm fond of wearing when I fly. It's my favorite way to misappropriate the provocativeness of an all too timely literary critique in a world that bastardizes the bastardized.
This was my first foray into the world and mind of Chuck Palahniuk, and along with Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, and Choke, it's maybe the book I have to repurchase most as I gift it out to those wanting to snort and cry and shake their head all at once.
Definitely worth a try, if you can survive it.