It's not just you. Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Survivor are all excellent books. Choke was the first book where he not only started repeating himself but exposed his formula. All of his books after that (i've read Lullaby and Diary) contain some interesting ideas but feel formulaic and underdeveloped.
In his defense, he did write somewhere that he felt constrained by how society developed after 9/11 (just imagine the reaction to the closing scene of the Fight Club movie post 9/11) and that he was trying to change his approach to his writing in response to it.
I see that you also gave up on Palahniuk relatively early. Is it just me, or did he become a parody of himself?
ReplyDeleteIt's not just you. Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Survivor are all excellent books. Choke was the first book where he not only started repeating himself but exposed his formula. All of his books after that (i've read Lullaby and Diary) contain some interesting ideas but feel formulaic and underdeveloped.
ReplyDeleteIn his defense, he did write somewhere that he felt constrained by how society developed after 9/11 (just imagine the reaction to the closing scene of the Fight Club movie post 9/11) and that he was trying to change his approach to his writing in response to it.