Review: Make Something Up – Stories You Can’t Unread

Readers of Chuck Palahniuk’s comic book sequel to Fight Club might see his recently released short-story collection Make Something Up and think “Oh hey, it’s the guy who wrote the book that the Brad Pitt film was based on. I’ll probably love this.”

Whoa. Slow down. Hold up. Hang on just a minute.

Palahniuk is the author of Survivor and Rant, two books which are close to the top of my list of all-time favorites. However, his novels also include – among other things – graphic detail about drug use, horrific violence, sex addiction, hell, rape, death by eating diamonds, and a porn star trying to set a new world’s record. The man kept a running tab of the number of people who passed out during live readings from his novel Haunted (which remains the only book so gruesome that I had to stop reading it) and each story in Make Something Up is a distilled sample of everything that makes Palahniuk’s work so fascinating and appalling.

In short, there aren’t enough trigger warnings in the world for this collection. Enter at your own risk.

What you have to understand about Palahniuk’s writing is that everything is fair game. No matter what you hold sacred, he’ll find some way to poke at it, and make you think about it in ways you’d really rather not. And he usually makes his point by creating the most stomach-churning scenes possible. Palahniuk seems to have a “Come at me bro” attitude with some of these stories, always pushing things just a little farther, trying to find that one taboo subject that will offend everyone, even the people who think they’re completely open-minded. It makes it hard to put warnings on the book when the stories include such a wide range of things that might bother people.

Make Something UpFor instance, there are a couple of instances of off-screen rape, so you might want to avoid the book if you’re triggered by that. The story “Knock Knock” has some of the most in-your-face racist and misogynistic jokes (many of them screamed at top volume by a son desperate to get a laugh out of his dying jokester of a father) which might make some readers really uncomfortable.At least half of the stories have sexual content (usually a disturbing type, especially for the character in “The Toad Prince”), and the rest are an even mix of violence and drug-use. I can’t be specific about the stories that bothered me the most since many times the graphic content ends up being the entire point of the story, so I’ll just say that you shouldn’t read the stories in the first half of the book if you don’t like when awful things happen involving animals, and for God’s sake don’t read  “Cannibal” at all. Really. Don’t do it. Even if you’re curious. I dare you.

That’s not to say that these stories don’t work, because most of them absolutely do. Palahniuk creates a never ending supply of losers and outcasts, each with their own unique outlook…which usually boils down to a) why they’re right and everyone else is wrong and b) their plan to “fix” everything. Watching the author splash the characters’ neurosis all over the page is never pretty, but also never boring.

“Mister Elegant” is a callback to Palahniuk’s earlier novels, with a washed up male stripper laying out the drab, decidedly un-sexy truth about life in an exotic dance company, with random information thrown in about catastrophic birth defects. “The Facts of Life” is a straight-up shaggy dog story (don’t skip to the end, it’s worth it), and “Liturgy” is short and hilarious and so very, very wrong. It’s quite a feat to write a story that pokes fun at Earth-mother types and gated communities at the same time.

Do yourself a favor if you can and don’t read the book summary or the jacket notes first; they give away something important for “Expedition”. It didn’t ruin the story, it’s still a nicely creepy tale with an archaic, almost Lovecraftian style, but I think it would have been even better if I hadn’t had that one piece of information first.

Probably my favorite in the collection is “Torcher”. It’s a murder-mystery set in a knock-off version of Burning Man, with all the sordid details about what goes into the day-to-day business of a desert festival. In a perfect world Palahniuk would be looking at ways to stretch this one into a full-length novel; like many of the stories in this collection it ended right when it looked like the real story was just getting started.

“My idea of Hell would be going to Heaven and being forced to pretend I’m like you for the rest of eternity.”

The entries in this book are overwhelmingly dark, There’s usually with some kind of humor to balance it out a little, but still, dark. Palahniuk likes to play up how ridiculous everything is in life: everything we think is important, everything we’re told to believe is important, all our motivations and the different ways we talk ourselves down our own path to destruction. The world Palaniuk shows us is one where none of us believe any other human being exists, not really. We’re all the only person in the universe, screaming our rationalizations to ourselves in the desperate hope that the universe will spontaneously create just one person who will finally understand what we’re screaming about. And you know, it actually does happen in a few stories here.

But I’m not going to tell you which ones.