Publishers Weekly
07/17/2023
Palahniuk (The Invention of Sound) delivers a grisly yet hazy satire of slasher stories. Two 20-something brothers embrace a murderous strain of arrested development in their upper-crust household in present-day Wales, where they listen to stories from their contract killer grandfather, who claims to have offed Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, and other celebrities. Despite their ages, the brothers still have governesses, and Cecil, who narrates, looks on while his older sibling, Otto, stabs one of them to death. Cecil also recounts Otto’s other killings, among them a landscaper and the family’s dog. There are also heavy-handed hints about the brothers’ incest. Episodes in the plotless mélange include Otto and Cecil creating a deranged lottery system for their neighbors, where the winner is killed in front of the other players, and their grandfather’s ill-advised attempt to force Otto into the killing-for-hire racket. Palahniuk’s unflinching approach to the macabre material is sure to please many of his fans, but the gratuitous violence and aimless narrative won’t win any new ones. Fight Club this is not. Agent: Sloan Harris and Dan Kirschen, ICM Partners. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR NOT FOREVER, BUT FOR NOW:
“Palahniuk’s unflinching approach to the macabre material is sure to please many of his fans”—Publishers Weekly
“A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The very same satirical content Palahniuk’s legion of fans has come to expect and relish.”—Booklist
PRAISE FOR CHUCK PALAHNIUK
“Palahniuk doesn’t write for tourists. He writes for hard-core devotees drawn to the wild, angry imagination on display and the taboo-busting humor.”—The New York Times
“Like Edgar Allan Poe, Palahniuk is a bracingly toxic purveyor of dread and mounting horror. He makes nihilism fun.”—Vanity Fair
“Palahniuk’s literature is a breed all its own.”—USA Today
“With his love of contemporary fairy tales that are gritty and dirty rather than pretty, Palahniuk is the likeliest inheritor of Vonnegut’s place in American writing.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“One of the most feverish imaginations in American letters.”—The Washington Post
“Few authors have captured the pathologies of modern life quite like Palahniuk.”—Rocky Mountain News
“Truly unique. He writes at the edge of crazy, and you can feel his desperate urge to get at the truth of things.”—The Seattle Times
Kirkus Reviews
2023-07-13
A pair of infantile, homicidal brothers decide to take over the family business.
Aiming Palahniuk’s profanely giddy rhetoric at the tea-and-crumpets crowd popularized by Downton Abbey and its ilk sounds like more fun than it turns out to be here. The book utterly unloads with both barrels in a sadistic folktale that aims to satirize homophobia, celebrity death culture, and the British class system all at once, but this much transgressive glee might be more than readers expect. To listen to their rhetoric at the beginning of this short novel, one might think Otto and Cecil really are the “twee, feeble, measly boys” they imagine themselves to be, complete with a nanny to bathe them and tuck them in at night in their manor in the Welsh countryside. It’s a different picture once you get past unreliable narrator Cecil’s flowery prose and realize the wee brothers are actually 20-something young men with a freakish, drug-addicted mother and a patently far-fetched predilection for rape, sodomy, and the lash. They also apparently have a future in the family business, where their grandfather Sir Richard supposedly manages the course of history. From Kent State to the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis, we learn all these pivotal events were the result of the family trade —their mother responsible for flashing a strobe light in a Parisian tunnel, or their grandfather administering a phenobarbital and champagne enema to Judy Garland in 1969. “Those misdeeds that need doing,” as Cecil explains, include the deaths of figures like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and Diana, Princess of Wales, among others. If the history askew doesn’t grab you, by all means stay for the plethora of servant murders (“Then there was the year the maid got herself killed. Don’t ask me which”) or the rapists and killers Otto goads into visiting or the tutor Otto buggers so senseless that he gives himself over to the little bastards’ ministrations to make him more like them.
A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.
