Product Description

From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor.

"A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." --Newsday

"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk's hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039's "black box" in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback.

Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3791 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-04
• Released on: 2000-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
Some say that the apocalypse swiftly approacheth, but that simply ain't so according to Chuck Palahniuk. Oh no. It's already here, living in the head of the guy who just crossed the street in front of you, or maybe even closer than that. We saw these possibilities get played out in the author's bloodsporting-anarchist-yuppie shocker of a first novel, Fight Club. Now, in Survivor, his second and newest, the concern is more for the origin of the malaise. Starting at chapter 47 and screaming toward ground zero, Palahniuk hurls the reader back to the beginning in a breathless search for where it all went wrong. This time out, the author's protagonist is self-made, self-ruined mogul-messiah Tender Branson, the sole passenger of a jet moments away from slamming first into the Australian outback and then into oblivion. All that will be left, Branson assures us with a tone bordering on relief, is his life story, from its Amish-on-acid cult beginnings to its televangelist-huckster end. All of this courtesy of the plane's flight recorder.

Speaking of little black boxes, Skinnerians would have a field day with the presenting behavior of the folks who make up Palahniuk's world. They pretend they're suicide hotline operators for fun. They eat lobster before it's quite... done. They dance in morgues. The Cleavers they are not. Scary as they might be, these characters are ultimately more scared of themselves than you are, and that's what makes them so fascinating. In the wee hours and on lonely highways, they exist in a perpetual twilight, caught between the horror of the present and the dread of the unknown. With only two novels under his belt, Chuck Palahniuk is well on his way to becoming an expert at shining a light on these shadowy creatures. --Bob Michaels

From Publishers Weekly
The rise and fall of a media-made messiah is the subject of Palahniuk's impressive second novel (after the well-received Fight Club), a wryly mannered commentary on the excesses of pop culture that tracks the 15 minutes of fame of the lone living member of a suicide cult. Tender Branson, aged 33, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the "black box" while flying randomly until the plane runs out of gas and crashes. Branson relates in his long flashback the vicissitudes of his life: a member of the repressive Creedish Death Cult, supposedly founded by a splinter group of Millerites in 1860, he is hired out as a domestic servant who must dedicate his earnings to the cult. Despite his humble beginnings, Branson finds himself on the edge of fame and fortune when the cult members begin their suicide binge, and he keeps himself on the media radar by using the psychic dreams of his potential romantic interest, Fertility Hollis, in which the girl accurately predicts a series of strange disasters. After a brief period at the top of the freak-show heap, Branson succumbs to the excesses of his trade when his agent mysteriously dies at the Super Bowl as Branson predicts the outcome of the game at half-time, simultaneously triggering a riot and turning him into a murder suspect. Branson's spookily matter of fact account of his bizarre experiences does not excite tension until the narrative is well under way, but the novel picks up momentum during the homestretch when Branson goes on the lam with Fertility and his murderous brother Adam, and the story steamrolls toward its nightmarish climax. Palahniuk's DeLilloesque cultural witticisms and his satirical take on the culture of instant celebrity invest the narrative with a dark humor that does not quite overcome its lack of a coherent plot. Agent, Edward Hibbert. (Feb.) FYI: Fight Club is being filmed by David Fincher.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A morbidly fascinating black fantasy about a young cult members rise to fame and his fall from grace, written by West Coast novelist Palahniuk (Fight Club, 1996). When an airliner goes down, the first thing the authorities look for amid the wreckage is the black box that contains a recording of the pilots last words, which are usually grim but fairly restrainedalmost always because the pilot doesnt expect (almost always) to die. Tender Bransons situation is unusual: the last survivor of an obscure American religion known as the Creedish Death Cult, he is dictating his confession into the black box of a 747 that he knows will soon crash somewhere over the Australian outback. What youve found, he declares, is the story of what went wrong. Thats putting it softly. Like all Creedalists, Branson, raised for a life of obscure service to strangers, chose to hire himself out as an unpaid domestic while still in his teens. Probably he would have spent his life keeping house for the yuppie vulgarians who took him in, but an FBI raid on the Creedish Church compound in Nebraska resulted in a mass suicide within the cult. Since then, surviving Creedalists living in the field have been killing themselves on a regular basis, so that Branson is soon the only Creedalist left. As such, he becomes a genuine celebrity, complete with an agent who gets him book contracts, movie dealsand with a good lawyer intent on winning him uncontested title to all Creedish Church properties. A marriage is arranged for him . . . and televised live from the Super Bowl during halftime. But things turn sour when evidence mounts that many of the suicides were, in fact, murdersand that Bransons brother Adam may still be alive. Is Branson a serial killer? Or Adam? Can they ever lead a normal life again? Brilliant, engrossing, substantial, and fun: Palahniuk carves out credible, moving dramas from situations that seemed simply outlandish and sad on the evening news. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Chuck Does it Again
I read this after tearing through "Choke," another masterful novel. Admittedly, I'm not much of a novel reader. I gravitate toward non-fiction, but Palahniuk is a great writer that can really pull me in to his story. After choke, this story took a little longer to get into, but I enjoyed it very much.

There is something about his writing that strikes me as very profound: he either writes about what you already know in a way you hadn't been able to express before or convinces you that you think the same way about something. Either way, he's a very talented author. Finally, a writer for our Generation. Thanks, Chuck.

A rollercoaster with few surprises...
I've been on this ride before, I think, as I strap myself in and open up to the first page of "Survivor."

You'd really think that it would be impossible for a novel by a writer as fiercely original as CP to be formulaic--but write enough of them quickly enough at the pace that today's publishers insist to justify their marketing budgets and make their millions and you end up with Danielle Steel...and now, not quite, but almost, and still a lot more interesting, Chuck Palahniuk.

In this one, a charismatic religious leader, the last surviving member of suicide cult, is alone on an airliner recording his tragicomic life-story into the jet's black box before it crashes into the Australian outback. The whole novel is structured like a countdown to the inevitable crash, even the pages are numbered backward to zero, pretty clever, huh? It's a device custom-made for someone like me who's always so impatient to get on to the next book that I'm perpetually doing the math to figure out how many pages I have to go before I'm finished with the book I'm reading. I think all books should be reverse-numbered this way!

Eccentric characters, an elastic reality stretched to the point of absurdity in the service of satire, a merciless critique of contemporary culture, lots or random factoids such as how to get rid of bloodstains or inject steroids--and all told in a quirky first person voice that uses a distinctive patois made up of repetition, one-liners, and pseudo Valley-girl speak (a sort of "anti-writing" like you'd find in a graphic novel but without the pictures)...and there you have the general blueprint of the CP perpetual novel-writing machine. You keep signing the million-dollar checks, he'll keep writing essentially the same novel.

Can you blame him? I can't. I'd do the same thing; ride it out while you can, right? Cause like the jet in "Survivor," you're going to crash eventually.

Listen, I'm a fan of CP; well, at least a fan of the general idea of CP. "Invisible Monsters" blew me away. "Choke" had me sputtering with admiration. And, if this is the first novel by CP that you read, you're bound to like "Survivor," provided CP is to your taste at all. And there really isn't anything wrong with "Survivor" even stacked up against the other novels, it's just that it's something like looking at a wall of Warhol "Maos." They're all a little different, but there all essentially the same.

Somehow repetition works better as a technique in painting than in writing. You can't silkscreen a novel. Well, actually you can...the shelves of any bookstore in the USA are practically nothing else than silk-screened variations of two or three (no longer) original ideas. You hit on a winning formula and you milk it for every drop its worth.

And thus "Survivor."

Anyway, the same old CP is a hundred times better than the same old Grisham.

we're all conformists
This book deftly shows what the difference is between groups like Jonestown, the Amish and those within the mainstream culture: nothing. We are all fated to be just alike the only difference with groups such as the Amish, etc., is that at least they are aware of their conformity. Brilliant little piece of work.