Wow.
This is me picking up this book: "Jason, just let me borrow it; it's 400 pages, I can read it in one weekend. Come on." Yeah. That's four-hundred Palahniuk pages, and not to be trifled with.
It's called a novel in stories. And such it is. The basic set up is a group of wannabe writers signs up for a top-secret retreat. They're picked up by bus where they drive off into the sunrise, stripped of real names (now called Comrade Snarky, Chef Assassin, Miss Sneezy, etc.) and carrying only one suitcase. Because of the need for mysetery you can't have a lot of background on the characters, but he lets you go into their suitcases right away, which is great for us nosey types. The lasy with the frost-bitten face has lipgloss. One lady brought her cat. An exercise wheel. Junk food.
I can't quite do my literary analysis thang here without ruining everybody's plot discovery buzz, so I'll be brief.
The novel in stories is (A)novel, being the tale of writers on dubious retreat punctuated by (B) poems, the work of the narrator whose name we don't get to know, which are not really very good but interesting; followed up with (C) the writers' stories. These are the works the characters have gone away to write, although they end up just babling them to each other.
And I quote: "You could put Mahatma Ghandi into a convent, cut off his nuts, shoot him full of Demerol, and he'd still take a shot at your face if you played him that 'Wind Beneath Your Wings' song. Least-wise, that was Webber's experience."
And I quote again: "Even the Link knows that eating a dead man's severed penis will get him extra prime-time exposure on every late-night talk show in the world."
After the initial few times I had to spend several minutes uncrossing my eyes, or walking up to coworkers and geturing wildly at pages, after that first short story, with the gnawing off of the intestines (yeah, that's right), I got into the groove. And it was beautiful. 'Cause you read this book jacket, and it's an ad for some writers retreat geared to someone like you, or me, some has-yet-to-be, with the great internal masterpiece composing and recomposing itself every second, with every breath and you feel that yearning, you yourself want to go away for three months; you'll get on the bus, you're mentally packing the one bag... but after the first couple of stories you see that these are just regualr people (nut cases, but just normal ones) who want to be rich and nor work. It isn't they have a great inner calling, a divine gift or burning desire to create. They want money.
It's gorgeous. It's disgusting and repellent and the book is down right gross (the microwave a bitch's leg and she eats some of it, man; that's not kosher).
But, it's beautiful.
This shit is a nine, all the way. If all but one of the poems hadn't been crap-ola, I'd have given it a ten. Stick to deranged social commentary fiction, Chucky. Anne Sexton you are not.