By

Carman

"Choke" - Chuck Palahniuk

I don't know how to describe this book without giving away so much yet leaving a lot out. I can mention the cloning of Jesus Christ from his foreskin. I can mention getting an anal bead stuck in your ass and having your bowels blocked. Time travel, product tampering, building a tower shaped like a penis in the middle of a city. Or I can tell you what it says on the back.

"Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve."

Either way, Choke has all of these things and more. Choke is probably Palahniuk’s most cynical work (He wrote other shit besides Fight Club and Invisible Monsters... don't let the emo fags tell you that Invisible Monsters is good, because it fucking blows.  Also, he wrote it BEFORE Fight Club, but it was published AFTER.) and too graphic to be made into a movie. It has much more humor but a lot less philosophy than Fight Club, and more helpful hints (which is an occurring theme in Palahniuk's work), such as how to masturbate in public or how to be nude at the beach WITHOUT being nude at all.

The story itself is well written. Everything is laid out in what seems like a structure, but really it’s a hodgepodge of flashbacks and bizarre escapades in the present. The characters are developed enough so that the reader starts to identify with them, but we don't really know much about them, like a buddy someone would hang out with at work.

Yeah, this review isn't long.  If you noticed I didn't mention shit about the story itself, but if the first paragraph didn't make you want to read it, you need to remove the steel girder out of your ass and maybe a sense of humor will grow.