Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters Remix

his is how old I am: I loved the Sears catalogue. It kills me that I now need to explain what that was. It was an inventory of everything you ever dreamed of owning. Imagine the entire Internet printed on paper and bound along one edgea stack of glossy paper as thick as a telephone book. Please dont ask me to explain what a telephone book was. By now you imagine Im wearing a bowler hat and a celluloid collar, driving my horseless carriage, lickety-split, to a torrid three-way with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Abraham Lincoln.

As opposed to you, you wholl always stay so young and hip.

Be that as it may. This modern world isnt all its cracked up to be.

Nowadays, whatever purchase you moon over, whatever person you lust after, most likely its presented on a smooth glass or plastic screen. On a laptop or a television. And no matter what the technology, youll catch sight of your own reflection. In that electric mirror, there hovers your faint image. Youll be superimposed over every email. Or, lurking in the glassy surface of online porn, there you are. Fewer people shut down their computers anymore, and who can blame them? The moment that monitor goes black, youre looking at yourself, not smiling, not anything. Heres your worst-ever passport photo enlarged to life size. Swimming behind the eBook words of Jane Austen, that slack, dead-eyed zombie face, thats yours. Thats you.

The Sears catalogue was better. The paper reflected nothing. You could lose yourself in the Sears catalogue. The one published for the Christmas season they called the Wish Book, and seldom has a name been more accurate because it held hundreds of pages of toys and food and clothes, tools, and you-name-it. You could never remember it all, and every time you opened that book you found something youd never seen before. Every time you cracked those pages you fell in love. Children and young people are always looking for an anchor, a tether, some attachment to ground them in the impossible world. The objects in the Sears catalogue baited you into adulthood. You couldnt wait to find a job, any job, and start buying stuff. The vastness of stuff was unknowable. It was the world.

Thats how I originally structured this book: to be a little unknowable. Reader friends complained about how the dwindling number of pages, those physical sheets of paper you held between the thumb and index finger of your right hand, suggested when the plot of a novel was reaching its climax. At the time I had no washing machine. Were talking 1991. I took my dirty clothes to a Laundromat called City Laundry every Tuesday after work. The place was cluttered with old magazines, old Vogue magazines brought in by the owner, Gretchen. They were the only reading material, and I tried reading them. The pages were seldom numbered. The pages were chockablock with artsy photos and quotes, enlarged and lifted out of context. In articles, the feature copy started near the front of the magazine but quickly jumped to pages near the back. Trying to read a story was like trying to navigate through a Las Vegas casino. It was designed to entice and seduce you. It was designed to trap you. I got lost. I loved it. I told myself, Why cant a novel do this?

So thats how I originally wrote this book. The story would not unspool as a continuous linear series of and then, and then, and thens At the end of the first chapter, the reader would be directed to jump to, for example, Chapter Thirty. At the end of Chapter Thirty, shed be told to jump to Chapter Sixteen. Following the plot would mean paging forward and backward, and youd never know where the story might end. It might all come to a head at the physical center of the book. Better yet, as you hunted for the next chapter, youd glimpse marvelous, ridiculous scenes, and youd wonder, How will the story ever get there?

Most of the book I wrote while watching music videos on MTV. Yes, thats how old I am. Back then MTV still played videos. Now, no doubt, you picture me wearing high-button shoes and rolling a hoop down a dirt road inI dont knowancient Thebes?

Nobody ever had so much fun writing a book. Id be couch surfing with Alexander Graham Bell and Dolley Madison, watching Echo & the Bunnymen videos. Abraham Lincoln would order a pizza, and Bell would offer everyone hits of MDA. Thats how far back this happened, we didnt call Ecstasy E. We didnt even call it X. Louisa May Alcott would be rolling us a fatty.

Id shake my head no. Id whine, Guys, I cant get high. I need to write my novel.

And Harriet Beecher Stowe would say, Dude, why cant you do both?

You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs and good times, fuck you.

That was my original plan for Invisible Monsters. Even after the reader reached the words The End shed still sense she hadnt read it all. The book would still hold some lingering secrets. You could open it again and find somethingas with the Sears catalogue or Vogue magazine or anyone you lovesomething that youd never seen before. Think D. H. Lawrences Odour of Chrysanthemums but scored with music by Bronski Beat. Thats how I originally wrote this book. It was packed with jumps. Hidden secrets. Buried treasure. I gave the original manuscript to a friend, Monica Drake, the author of Clown Girl. She read it the way she had read every other book, from beginning to end page one, page two, page three and then, and then, and then She told me that jumping was too difficult. Readers, Monica warned me, most readers, arent going to want to work that hard. Theyd get lost. Back then, neither Monica nor I had been published. We didnt want to make trouble. We just wanted for people to love us.

So I hammered the story into a nice, smooth, straight line. I threw out the magic. A wonderful publisher bought the rights. It was launched in 1999 as a paperback. Its only ever been a paperback. End of story.

Still, Harriets words kept echoing in my head: Why cant you do both?

Twelve years later, the publisher W. W. Norton suggested producing a hardcover version of the book, and I saw my chance. The Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Program. I told myself: Here we go again. Where youre supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over the house

You might mark every page with a little X, like leaving a trail of bread crumbs, to make sure you read them all. Or dont. Me, personally? I hope you get lost. I mean, really, would that be so bad?

ont expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then.

What happens here will have more of that fashion magazine feel, a Vogue or a Glamour magazine chaos with page numbers on every second or fifth or third page. Perfume cards falling out, and full-page naked women coming out of nowhere to sell you makeup.

Dont look for a contents page, buried magazine-style twenty pages back from the front. Dont expect to find anything right off. There isnt a real pattern to anything, either. Stories will start and then, three paragraphs later:

Jump to page whatever.

Then, jump back.

This will be ten thousand fashion separates that mix and match to create maybe five tasteful outfits. A million trendy accessories, scarves and belts, shoes and hats and gloves, and no real clothes to wear them with.