San Francisco Chronicle // Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
My review ran in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Chuck Palahniuk appreciates more than anybody else writing today the dark matter that holds our world together. Like the great Kurt Vonnegut in his heyday, he writes sentences so outwardly simple that, were it not for the boldness and clarity of his creative vision, they could easily congeal into schlock-heavy pulp fiction. Palahniuk revels in exposing the moral and psychic fault lines of our society. He writes about the ugly underbelly of contemporary life, but in Palahniukland – which is our land, only amplified well beyond the point of distortion – the seedy underbelly is all that’s left.