So, if we were to have a conversation that lasted more than about five minutes you can pretty much be sure to hear at least a little of my rant about dear old Chuck. At one point, before I had made the terrible decision to revisit all of his works, one might have said I was the biggest Palahnuik fan to walk the face of the earth. I worshipped his intensive, well-integrated research; I marvelled at his deep, thought provoking themes; I devoured every word he put to paper.
But that was before.
When his father and step mother were murdered by the woman's jail-bird ex boyfriend, Chuck really struggled. He was involved in the sentencing of the murderer, and wrote Lullaby to help himself cope with such a tough decision. Now, I'm all for writing out one's feelings, but he never seemed to recover. His first novels were mold-shattering examples of society-challenging works. They asked questions, they dared to say hey, I see a problem with this and I'm going to explore and extrapolate on the most extreme outcomes. This was not so with what I will refer to as the post-murder-novels.
In the PMN's the same themes are brought up repetetively. Sure, the story is different but where I had expected a plot with more twists than a bendy straw, all I get is a satirical thriller. Don't get me wrong, the research is still impeccable, and the stories are still unique and compelling from a superficial point of view. It's the underbelly of the beast that I find lacking. His writing went from being a paragon of defiant rage, to a confused almost whiny fixation on suffering and reincarnation.
Now, I can't speak for Pygmy or Rant, because I never got around to reading them. By the time I finished Survivor, Diary, Haunted, Snuff, and Damned I had pretty much gotten the point. I can say that his aforementioned all centered around basically the same themes, and explored the same ideas. "What happens when we die?", "Are we reincarnated?" and "Suffering: why me?"
I understand that the loss of a parent is not one to be taken lightly, but dwelling on one thing can't be healthy. Not to mention how boring it gets. The murder of his father was the absolute worst thing that could ever have happened to Mr. Palahniuk's narratives.
Moral of the story? Don't kill anybody- you might ruin a great writer.
