And so I continue to nibble on through the Palahniuk collection with much glee and abandon, indeed with the same energy that I use when I mash up that glassy layer of jam when you open a new jar, and I can’t help but see all the threads. Like Fight Club, Haunted and Lullaby, Survivor seems to lose its head in the last seventh of the novel and runs away tying together all the little tangents it stemmed. It’s interesting, entertaining and certainly leaves you thinking about how the damn thing ended when you close the book, but it’s also dizzying. But then, Palahniuk has never been a fan of the cozy read. Hell, he wouldn’t be so darn lovable if he was just another cozy writer who didn’t want to upset anyone.He loves his layers too, that chap. Survivor is a veritable Black Forest Gateaux of satire, commentary, in-jokes and mini story arcs. The summary tells us that it’s the story told to a Black Box of a hijacked plane by the last surviving member of a mass-suicide cult. But when you get into it, it’s about how cyclical life and its motions are - how the same things are just going to happen again and again. It’s about manufactured celebrities and how evil copywriters are. It’s about the future and how it’s just going to be our past in another shade, so there’s no reason to be afraid as a species.

It’s sharper than Lullaby and has more wit than Fight Club, but even with a story like this it doesn’t completely nail the sense of nihilism that his most famous book did. It makes great use of internal repetition - almost as successfully as Invisible Monsters, actually.

So, a good read, if you’re in to something a little different.

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