Product Description

She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she is transformed from the beautiful center of attention to an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you'll ever want to look.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2282 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 278 pages

Amazon.com
When the plot of your first novel partially hinges on anarchist overthrows funded by soap sales, and the narrative hook of your second work is the black box recorder of a jet moments away from slamming into the Australian outback, it stands to reason that your audience is going to be ready for anything. Which, to an author like Chuck Palahniuk, must sound like a challenge. Palahniuk's third identity crisis (that's "novel" to you), Invisible Monsters, more than ably responds to this call to arms. Set once again in an all-too-familiar modern wasteland where social disease and self-hatred can do more damage than any potboiler-fiction bad guy, the tale focuses particularly on a group of drag queens and fashion models trekking cross-country to find themselves, looking everywhere from the bottom of a vial of Demerol to the end of a shotgun barrel. It's a sort of Drugstore Cowboy-meets-Yentl affair, or a Hope-Crosby road movie with a skin graft and hormone-pill obsession, if you know what I mean.

Um, yeah. Anyway, the Hollywood vibe doesn't stop these comparisons. As with Fight Club and Survivor, the book is invested with a cinematic sweep, from the opening set piece, which takes off like a house afire (literally), to a host of filmic tics sprayed throughout the text: "Flash," "Jump back," "Jump way ahead," "Flash," "Flash," "Flash." You get the idea. It's as if Palahniuk didn't write the thing but yanked it directly out of the Cineplex of his mind's eye. Does it succeed? Mostly. Still working on measuring out the proper dosages of his many writerly talents (equal parts potent imagery, nihilistic coolspeak, and doped-out craziness), Palahniuk every now and then loosens his grip on the story line, which at points becomes as hard to decipher as your local pill addict's medicine cabinet. However Invisible Monsters works best on a roller-coaster level. You don't stop and count each slot on the track as you're going down the big hill. You throw up your hands and yell, "Whee!" --Bob Michaels

From Publishers Weekly
Palahniuk's grotesque romp aims to skewer the ruthless superficiality of the fashion world and winds up with a tale as savagely glib as what it derides. Narrator Shannon McFarland, once a gorgeous fashion model, has been hideously disfigured in a mysterious drive-by shooting. Her jaw has been shot off, leaving her not only bereft of a career and boyfriend, but suddenly invisible to the world. Along comes no-nonsense, pill-popping diva Brandy Alexander, a resplendent, sassy, transgendered chick, who has modeled her body rearrangement--the breast implants, the hair, the figure--on what Shannon used to look like. Brandy suggests veils, high camp and no self-pity. Shannon wants revenge[...] Adding to the plot's contrivances are the relentless flashbacks, heralded at the beginning of almost every paragraph with "Jump back to..." and the author's pretentious device of using a fashion photographer's commands ("Flash. Give me adoration. Flash. Give me a break") to signpost the narrator's epiphanies. Palahniuk writes like he's overdosed on Details magazine. Though the absurd surprise ending may incite groans of disbelief, this book does have fun moments when campy banter tops the heroine's flat, whiny bathos. (Sept.) FYI: The film of Palahniuk's novel Fight Club will star Brad Pitt.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This is a wild ride of a novel. The narrator is an unnamed fashion model who's had her lower jaw shot off in an ambush. In the hospital, she meets her new mentor, the Princess Brandy Alexander, who is in the middle of a year-long gender reassignment process. Together, they launch a picaresque voyage of revenge on the narrator's ex-best friend, model Evie, and ex-boyfriend, vice cop Manus, who were having an affair before the shooting. Along the way they pick up Sean, whom they are inexplicably feeding gender-altering pharmaceuticals without his knowledge. The novel opens with its climax, then jumps around the narrator's life, introducing her crazy parents, her ostensibly dead brother, and the nun-nurse who is trying to fix her up with other patients who have suffered disfiguring accidents. No one is who he or she seems to be, and the challenge is to figure out who is morphing into whom. By the end, most readers will be both exhausted and exhilarated. George Needham

Customer Reviews

This book is ca-razy!
I concur with those who say this is one of Pahlaniuk's best books. This one is fresher than some of his other work. It is fast moving, and the main character, actually the main characters, are whacked-out yet somehow relatable.

Once it gets going, the story is, as mentioned above, Crazy! Super fast moving, if not terribly plausible. Highly entertaining and memorable. When I have loaned my CP books to friends, this one has recieved the most favorable reaction. Really, rather a modern classic that fans of Fight Club will definitely relish.

a slow start, followed by a headlong rush. This book stayed in my head for a long time afterward!
I tried to read this one other time and couldn't get past the start. The second time I stuck with it for just a bit, and very soon the story became gripping, rolling around in my head, and building upon itself. More, and more, and it doesn't stop.

Chuck Palahnuik has a way of rising to a crescendo, making you wait for the wave to crash down, yet it rises ever higher, higher, till you feel like you're holding your breath. Something happens, and before you can even gulp it is ascending again into a maelstrom of twisted events and epiphanies that leave you lightheaded.

'Ole Chuck's kinda twisted. I went out and bought more of his stuff.

A Good One
I borrowed this book from my psychology teacher to read because I had read the reviews and wanted to read it for myself. I thought it was a very good read but around the middle of the book, the storyline became stagnant. But, as I kept reading, I ended up loving the overall story and would recommend it to anyone that likes Palahniuk's work.