Chuck Palahniuk: a visceral, bloody and intense new book
Chuck Palahniuk attends a press conference during the 12th Rome Film Fest at Auditorium Parco Della Musica on October 31, 2017 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Ernesto S. Ruscio/Getty Images)
- The Invention of SoundÂ
- Chuck PalahniukÂ
- Corsair, hardback, €19.99
THE feverish imagination that brought us Fight Club is back in a new book that plays like a bloodcurdling horror movie with a strictly trashy B-movie ethic. If your local library or bookshop doesn’t carry health warnings on books then take this as one – The Invention of Sound is a warped and disturbing gothic horror that feasts at the table of the dark web and could torment readers who dare to enter here. So, you have been warned.
The book could be entombed in a casket and weighted to sink to the bottom of the ocean where it won’t distress gentle and impressionable minds. But for all the nasty elements – and there is a high body count of nastiness – in these pages there is the sense of a writer immersing himself in an underbelly of contemporary horrors and trying to create a new parable to staple on to the end of The Old Testament.
Essentially, a little girl goes missing while playing hide and seek with her dad, the trick of the game being that they were getting in and out of the elevators in a big downtown building. Years later, Foster, the dad – obsessed and wracked with grief – is still looking for her. The other story is of Mitzi. A much more crazed and richly metaphorical story, she is the daughter of a serial killer and has inherited the family business of recorded screams that are used in Hollywood and assorted horror movies. How these curated screams are harvested is the sickening and disturbing aspect of this unsettling story.
Both stories find themselves knee-deep in the murkiness of dark web territory and the underworld of so-called snuff movies.
The book begins with a siren wail which triggers every kind of dog in the city to howl. This surreal opening is echoed with a much greater gothic horror when a kind of ‘snuff’ scream used in a movie is copied by the couple of hundred teenagers present for the test screening – a nightmarish sonic event that literally brings the house down in a cataclysm killing everyone present.
Rather just creeping us out with a sinister blood-fest, Palahniuk wants this book to say something about the commodifying of experience – the process of identifying a human experience, depicting it, replicating it and selling it a million times over. And he wants to remind us that the internet is bringing us collectively to hell in a handcart.
Some interesting historical footnotes about disasters caused by sonic events are referenced in the book, including Angers Bridge in France where a battalion of soldiers fell into step and created what is described as a resonance disaster where the marching made such a vibration that it caused the collapse of the bridge and the loss of over 200 lives in 1850. Also mentioned is the 1981 collapse of two walkways at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kansas causing over 100 deaths during a huge synchronised performance of the Lindy Hop dance.
Towards the end, one of the characters tries to get through a howlingly melodramatic graveyard scene by telling himself he is only an actor in a cheap horror movie playing at a drive-in. And that does begin to describe the whole enterprise. Seeping from the pores here is a visceral and spectral intensity. And there is blood. So be afraid, be very afraid, Palahniuk is using a particularly lurid palette of colours to create his diabolical parable and it is heavy weather.
