Publisher's Weekly Review
For the first time, Palahniuk (Beautiful You) collects his short stories, which feature his signature humor, horror, and grit. Old fans will relish Tyler Durden, from Palahniuk's debut 1996 novel Fight Club, returning in "Expedition" to spread his twisted influence in Hamburg, Germany. Also included are previously published stories such as "Zombies," in which the newest high school fad is lobotomy by defibrillator; "Phoenix," in which a broken family deals with the aftermath of a house fire; and the cringe-worthy "Cannibal," capable of turning stomachs. Not surprisingly, Palahniuk finds sincerity among his characters even in disreputable occurrences in "Romance" and "How a Jew Saved Christmas." Some of his never-before-published stories show him experimenting with voice and style to mixed success, but the biggest winner is the novella "Inclinations," which follows a group of teenagers checked into a "gay cure" hospital. Other stories deal with fire, bodily fluids, malfunctions, critiques of material society, bestiality, a bewitched tennis ball, and a murder at a Burning Man-type retreat. The collection is essential for Palahniuk fans and will likely win him some new ones. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Given that Fight Club author Palahniuk can be a lot to handle when he's just telling you one story, picking up Make Something Up might demand some psychological preparation. The anthology lines up 22 of Palahniuk's best short stories with no interest in easing you into or out of the disturbing, hilarious, and bizarre roller coaster of transgressive creativity. Vignettes of grotesque body horror are bookended by stories with titles such as Why Coyote Never Had Money for Parking and Why Aardvark Never Went to the Moon. Even as you likely suffer debilitating motion sickness from the jarring emotional turns on every other page, you'll be inescapably restrained by an author who knows exactly what he's doing and has you right where he wants you. Palahniuk's uniquely modern style throws out any antiquated conventions that could keep him from destroying any expectations that keep you in complacent narrative comfort. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Much of Make Something Up is not for the squeamish or otherwise sensitive reader, but none of it is to be missed by those who highly regard this popular writer.--Francis, Chris Copyright 2015 Booklist
Guardian Review
A transgressive collection of short stories from an enfant terrible in desperate need of supervision No one would call Chuck Palahniuk a writer's writer. He isn't even, strictly speaking, a reader's writer. He's the sort of author who's admired by people who don't usually care for literature, and correspondingly scorned by those who do. In his new collection of stories, there are grounds for both the admiration and the scorn. The characters are one-dimensional throughout. The style can be lucid and fine, but also flat-footed, even sub-literate. All the stories are straining to be transgressive. Some of these transgressions are genuinely startling; some are at the level of schoolboys shouting swear words at a passing girl. The great strength is the storytelling: some plots are wildly implausible, but Palahniuk has an astounding talent for creating a gripping yarn that also has folkloric weight. Even the worst stories in Make Something Up have their share of this power -- and some are so bad that reading them aloud could make flies fall dead from the air. "Torcher", set at a Burning Man-like festival, is a seemingly endless series of worn-out hippy jokes, embellished with even older jokes about wee and breasts. "Expedition" is written in quasi-Victorian English, in which, for no apparent reason, Palahniuk misuses three words on every page and contorts phrases until their sense is lost. Phrases such as "To perpetrate such a coup, the possibility beguiled him" and "Piqued was Felix's interest" are so awful as to be puzzling. If it is pastiche, of what and why?Is Palahniuk assuming his fans won't notice the errors? Is the joke on them? Is it a joke on anyone with an ear for language, a way of telling them they don't belong here? Is it genuine illiteracy that outraged his editors so much they refused to fix it, preferring instead to expose it to the world? What it certainly isn't, is funny. Palahniuk also leans heavily on gross-out humour; at some point in each story, some character or other will be drenched in urine. If you don't find the word "foreskin" funny in itself, a lot of this will grate. Readers who find misogyny hard to take should also stay away. The misogyny is so pervasive that it not only affects depictions of women, but slops over on to men, cats, dogs and household appliances. If men are shamed, it's for a failure of masculinity. Pets eat human placentas and vomit them unerringly into a woman's lap. Even when Palahniuk humiliates a robotic vacuum cleaner, it feels as if he's targeting it for being a woman. Finally, the far-fetched plots can be wearying. Most adults aren't in the market for a story that brings together male strippers, incontinence and circus freaks ("Mister Elegant"); or one that depends on the premise that, if a boy were to contract every disease from every prostitute in town, the resulting warts would make his penis grow to be 8ft tall ("The Toad Prince"). These concoctions are hard to swallow but mercifully easy to forget. But in the best stories, a conjunction of zaniness, horror and sentiment propels you beyond disbelief into the space inhabited by good comic books, or by authors such as Rabelais and Burroughs. "Knock-Knock" is made up of offensive jokes that are revealed at the end to be a particularly insidious form of child abuse. "Inclinations" takes place in a camp where homosexual boys are scared straight, but where all the inmates are actually straight kids pretending to be gay to extort money from their conservative parents. Five plot twists later, it's a prison break story, then suddenly it's about the redemptive power of love, then it does a final back-flip and ties everything together with an act of bloody retribution. It shouldn't work -- I didn't want it to work -- but, believe it or not, it works. In stories like this, the prose is spare and clean, and there are moments of acute perception, such as this from "Phoenix": "Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It's like stealing something valuable they don't even know they own." In Palahniuk, we have a writer at the height of his powers, but who refuses to use those powers for good, and sometimes refuses to use them at all; who would rather soak his powers in urine, then eat them and vomit them into your lap. It's a performance that can be exhilarating when graceful, but simply painful when it is not. He is an enfant terrible in desperate need of adult supervision, and one wishes Palahniuk's editors would convince him not to publish his flimsiest tantrums. I would love to read his next "Knock-Knock", but not at the risk of reading his next "Torcher". * Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star is published by Vintage. To order Make Something Up for [pound]13.59 (RRP [pound]16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Sandra Newman.
Kirkus Review
Palahniuk (Beautiful You, 2014, etc.) comes roaring back from a stretch of experimentalism with 23 tales celebrating his ongoing affection for the macabre. It's been a while since we've seen Chuck at his most hard-core; he spent the last few years toying with satire, working his way into the heads of female narrators and curating the twisted anthology Burnt Tongues (2014). Here, he makes it absolutely clear that he's still the man who wrote "Guts," the infamous story that made fans pass out at readings. "The Toad Prince" makes "Guts" look like a fairy tale by comparison. It's the story of an enterprising young pervert who has infected his member with a fistful of vile diseases in order to launch a new era in extreme body modification fetishism. "Romance" takes apart traditional relationships with the story of a chubby dude who falls in love with a superhot Britney Spears look-alike who may or may not be dimwitted on a level approaching disability. There are some echoes here"Eleanor" is written in a strange, imitative patois that strongly recalls the novel Pygmy (2009), and a trio of fables resembles David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. But the core stories are pure muscle. The book opens with "Knock-knock," about a son trying to save his father from death with dirty jokes. The best (black) comedy comes from "Zombies," which finds America's gifted teens indulging in the hot new fad of taking a defibrillator to their skulls. The purest horror comes from "Inclinations," which begins with an adolescent girl using her unplanned pregnancies to collect Porsches from her parents before delving into a catalog of horrors at a sexual reorientation camp for teens. For fans, the book has "Expedition," which contains Palahniuk's first hints about Tyler Durden's true nature in advance of the upcoming Fight Club 2, to be released as comic books starting soon. Pathos and panic and penitence from one of the darkest and most singular minds in contemporary American lit. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Billed as Palahniuk's first collection, this volume features 21 stories and one novella, some never before published, As usual, the author's tales cover a wide variety of life experiences, some we would rather not think about. Whether exploring deceitful fathers, children using their sexuality to manipulate their parents, or teens whose latest fad is electrocuting themselves into a permanent stupor, Palahniuk takes his usual strange, off-kilter viewpoint on things we all deal with in life: fitting in, the desire for success, etc. Many of the stories are written as fables with anthropomorphized animal characters which try to find success in their careers or get through their teenage years. And Tyler Durden, the character from Fight Club, makes a brief appearance in "Expedition." Readers will find a similar tone in the Palahniuk-edited anthology Burnt Tongues. VERDICT You either love Palahniuk or hate him. For new readers, this compilation offers a small taste of the author's style. His faithful fans will be entertained, intrigued, and at times a little disgusted, but what else would we expect from Palahniuk? [See Prepub Alert, 11/3/14.]-Brooke Bolton, North Manchester P.L., IN © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Knock-Knock My old man, he makes everything into a Big Joke. What can I say? The old man loves to get a laugh. Growing up, half the time I didn't have a clue what his jokes were about, but I laughed anyways. Down at the barbershop, it didn't matter how many guys my father let take cuts ahead of him in line, he just wanted to sit there all Saturday and crack people up. Make folks bust a gut. Getting his hair cut was definitely a low priority. He says, "Stop me if you've heard this one before . . ." The way my old man tells it, he walks into the oncologist's office and he says, "After the chemotherapy, will I be able to play the violin?" In response, the oncologist says, "It's metastasized. You've got six months to live . . ." And working his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, tapping the ash from an invisible cigar, my old man says, "Six months?" He says, "I want a second opinion." So the oncologist, he says, "Okay, you've got cancer and your jokes stink." So they do chemotherapy, and they give him some radiation like they do even if the shit burns him up so bad on the inside he tells me that taking a piss is like passing razor blades. He's still every Saturday down by the barbershop telling jokes even if now he's bald as a cue ball. I mean, he's skinny as a bald skeleton, and he's getting to haul around one of those cylinders of oxygen under pressure, like some little version of a ball-and-chain. He walks into the barbershop dragging that pressurized cylinder of oxygen with the tube of it going up and looping around his nose, over his ears, and around his bald head, and he says, "Just a little off the top, please." And folks laugh. Understand me: My old man is no Uncle Milty. He's no Edgar Bergen. The man's skinny as a Halloween skeleton and bald and going to be dead by six weeks so it don't matter what he says, folks are going to hee-haw like donkeys just out of their genuine affection for him. But, seriously, I'm not doing him justice. It's my fault if this doesn't come across, but my old man is funnier than he sounds. Maybe his sense of humor is a talent I didn't inherit. Back when I was his little Charlie McCarthy, the whole time growing up, he used to ask me, "Knock-knock?" I'd say, "Who's there?" He'd say, "Old Lady . . ." I'd say, "Old Lady, who?" And he'd say, "Wow, I didn't know you could yodel!" Me, I didn't get it. I was so stupid, I was seven years old and still stuck in the first grade. I didn't know Switzerland from Shinola, but I want for my old man to love me so I learned to laugh. Whatever he says, I laugh. By "Old Lady" my guess is he means my mom who ran away and left us. All's my old man will say about her is how she was a "Real Looker" who just couldn't take a joke. She just was NOT a Good Sport. He used to ask me, "When that Vinnie van Gogh cut off his ear and sent it to the whore he was so crazy about, how'd he send it?" The punch line is "He sent it by 'ear mail,' " but being seven years old, I was still stuck back on not knowing who van Gogh is or what's a whore, and nothing kills a joke faster than asking my old man to explain himself. So when my old man says, "What do you get when you cross a pig with Count Dracula?" . . . I knew to never ask, "What's a 'Count Dracula'?" I'd just get a big laugh ready for when he tells me, "A 'Ham-pire'!" And when he says, "Knock-knock . . ." And I say, "Who's there?" And he says, "Radio." And I say, "Radio who?" And he's ALREADY started to bust a gut when he says, "Radio not I'm going to cum in your mouth . . ." Then--what the hell--I just keep laughing. My whole growing up I figure I'm just too ignorant to appreciate a good joke. Me, my teachers still haven't covered long division and all the multiple-cation tables so it's not my old man's fault I don't know what's "cum." My old lady, who abandoned us, he says she hated that joke so maybe I inherited her lack of humor. But love . . . I mean you have to love your old man. I mean, after you're born it's not like you get a choice. Nobody wants to see their old man breathing out of some tank and going into the hospital to die sky-high on morphine and he's not eating a bite of the red-flavored Jell-O they serve for dinner. Stop me if I already told you this one: but my old man gets that prostrate cancer that's not even like cancer because it takes twenty, thirty years before we even know he's so sick, and the next thing I know is I'm trying to remember all the stuff he's taught me. Like, if you spray some WD-40 on the shovel blade before you dig a hole the digging will go a lot easier. And he taught me how to squeeze a trigger instead of pulling it and wrecking my aim. He taught me to remove bloodstains. And he taught me jokes . . . lots of jokes. And, sure, he's no Robin Williams, but I watched this movie one time about Robin Williams who gets dressed up with a red rubber ball on his nose and this big rainbow-colored afro wig and those big clown shoes with a fake carnation stuck in his buttonhole of his shirt that squirts water, and the guy's a hotshot doctor who makes these little kids with cancer laugh so hard they stop dying. Understand me: These bald kid skeletons--who look worse off than my old man--they get HEALTHY, and that whole movie is based on a True Story. What I mean is, we all know that Laughter is the Best Medicine. All that time being stuck in the hospital Waiting Room, even I read the Reader's Digest. And we've all heard the true story about the guy with a brain cancer the size of a grapefruit inside his skull and he's about to croak--all the doctors and priests and experts say he's a goner--only he forces himself to watch nonstop movies about the Three Stooges. This Stage Four cancer guy forces himself to laugh nonstop at Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy and those Marx brothers, and he gets healed by the end-orphans and oxy-generated blood. So I figure, what've I got to lose? All I need to do is remember some of my old man's favorite gags and get him started back laughing on the road to recovery. I figure, what could it hurt? So this grown‑up son walks into his father's hospice room, pulls up a chair beside the bed, and sits down. The son looks into his old man's pale, dying face and says: "So this blond gal walks into a neighborhood bar where she's never been before, and she's got tits out to HERE and a tight little heinie and she asks the bartender for a Michelob, and he serves her a Michelob, except he sneaks a Mickey Finn into her bottle and this blonde goes unconscious, and every guy in the bar leans her over the edge of the pool table and hikes up her skirt and fucks her, and at closing time they slap her awake and tell her she's got to leave. And every few days this gal with the tits and the ass walks in and asks for a Michelob and gets a Mickey Finn and gets fucked by the crowd until one day she walks in and asks the bartender, can he maybe give her a Budweiser instead?" Granted--I have NOT landed this particular shaggy-dog story since I was in the first grade, but my old man used to love this next part . . . The bartender smiles so nice and says, "What? You don't like Michelob no more?" And this Real Looker, she leans over the bar, all confidential and she whispers, "Just between you and me . . ." she whispers, "Michelob makes my pussy hurt . . ." The first time I learned that joke, when my old man taught it to me, I didn't know what was "pussy." I didn't know "Mickey Finn." I didn't know what folks meant when they talked about "fucking," but I knew all this talk made my old man laugh. And when he told me to stand up and tell that joke in the barbershop it made the barbers and every old man reading detective magazines laugh until half of them blew spit and snot and chewing tobacco out their noses. Now the grown‑up son tells his old dying father this joke, just the two of them alone in that hospital room, late-late at night, and--guess what--his old man doesn't laugh. So the son tries another old favorite, he tells the joke about the Traveling Salesman who gets a phone call from some Farmer's Daughter he met on the road a couple months before, and she says, "Remember me? We had some laughs, and I was a good sport?" and the man says, "How're you doing?" and she says, "I'm pregnant, and I'm going to kill myself." And the salesman, he says, "Damn . . . you ARE a good sport!" At seven years old I could REALLY put that joke over--but, tonight the old man's still not laughing. How I learned to say "I Love You" was by laughing for my old man--even if I had to fake it--and that's all I want in return. All I want from him is a laugh, just one laugh, and he's not coming across with even a giggle. Not a snicker. Not even a groan. And worse than not-laughing, the old man squints his eyes shut, tight, and opens them brimming with tears, and one fat tear floods out the bottom of each eye and washes down each cheek. The old man's gasping his big toothless mouth like he can't get enough air, crying big tears down the wrinkles of both cheeks, just soaking his pillow. So this kid--who's nobody's little kid, not anymore--but who can't seem to forget these jokes, he reaches into his pants pocket and gets out a fake carnation flower that just-for-laughs sprays water all over the old crybaby's face. The kid tells about the Polack who's carrying a rifle through the woods when he comes across a naked gal laying back on a bed of soft green moss with her legs spread, and this gal is a Real Looker, and she looks at the Polack and his gun and says, "What're you doing?" And the Polack says, "I'm hunting for game." And this Real Looker, she gives him a big wink and she says, "I'm game." So--POW!--the Polack shoots her. It used to be this joke constituted a gold-plated, bona fide, sure-thing laugh riot, but the old man just keeps dying. He's still crying and not even making an effort to laugh, and no matter what, the old man has got to meet me halfway. I can't save him if he doesn't want to live. I ask him, "What do you get when you cross a faggot with a kike?" I ask him, "What's the difference between dog shit and a nigger?" And he's still not getting any better. I'm thinking maybe the cancer's got into his ears. With the morphine and what all, it could be he can't hear me. So just to test, can he hear me, I lean into his crybaby face and I ask, "How do you get a nun pregnant?" Then, more loud, maybe too loud for this being a mackerel-snapper hospital, I yell, "You FUCK her!" In my desperation I try fag jokes and wetback jokes and kike jokes--really, every effective course of treatment known to medical science--and the old man's still slipping away. Lying here, in this bed, is the man who made EVERYTHING into a Big Joke. Just the fact he's not biting scares the shit out of me. I'm yelling, "Knock-knock!" and when he says nothing in response it's the same as him not having a pulse. I'm yelling, "Knock-knock!" I'm yelling, "Why did the Existentialist cross the road?" And he's STILL dying, the old man's leaving me not knowing the answer to anything. He's abandoning me while I'm still so fucking stupid. In my desperation I reach out to take the limp, blue fingers of his cold-cold dying hand and he doesn't flinch even when I grind a Joy Buzzer against the blue skin of his ice-cold palm. I'm yelling, "Knock-knock?" I'm yelling, "Why'd the Old Lady walk out on her husband and her four-year-old kid?" Nothing kills a joke like asking my old man to explain himself, and lying there in that bed, he stops breathing. No heartbeat. Totally flatlined. So this kid who's sitting bedside in this hospital room, late-late at night he takes the joke equivalent of those electric paddles doctors use to stop your heart attack, the hee-haw equivalent of what a paramedic Robin Williams would use on you in some Clown Emergency Room--a kind of Three Stooges defibrillator--the kid takes a big, creamy, heaped‑up custard pie topped with a thick-thick layer of whipped cream, the same as Charlie Chaplin would save your life with, and the kid reaches that pie up sky-high overhead, as high as the kid can reach, and brings it down, hard, lightning-fast, slam-dunking it hard as the blast from a Polack's shotgun--POW!--right in his old man's kisser. And despite the miraculous, well-documented healing powers of the Comedic Arts my old man dies taking a big bloody shit in his bed. No, really, it's funnier than it sounds. Please, don't blame my old man. If you're not laughing at this point, it's my fault. I just didn't tell it right, you know, you mess up a punch line and you can totally botch even the best joke. For example, I went back to the barbershop and told them how he died and how I tried to save him, right up to and including the custard pie and how the hospital had their security goons escort me up to the crazy ward for a little seventy-two-hour observation. And even telling that part, I fucked it up--because those barbershop guys just looked at me. I told them about seeing--and smelling--my old man, dead and smeared all over with blood and shit and whipped cream, all that stink and sugar, and they looked and looked at me, the barbers and the old guys chewing tobacco, and nobody laughed. Standing in that same barbershop all these years later, I say, "Knock-knock." Excerpted from Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread by Chuck Palahniuk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.