Synopses & Reviews
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.
Review
"Sheer, anarchic fierceness of imagination....[A] raw and vital book." The New York Times
Review
"Puts a bleakly humorous spin on self-help, addiction recovery, and childhood trauma....[F]unny mantra-like prose plows toward the mayhem it portends from the get-go." The Village Voice
Review
"Palahniuk is a cheerful nihilist with a mordant wit and a taste for scatological humor. Fair warning: some may find his language and imagery offensive." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Victor is even more pathetic than Palahniuk's previous antiheroes....Still, the novel showcases the author's powers of description, character development and attention-getting dialogue handily enough to give this dark meditation on addiction a distinctive and humorous twist." Publishers Weekly
Review
"As with his previous novels, this one lacks subtlety, but it will have great appeal with the legions of disenfranchised who flocked to see Fight Club in the theater." John Green, Booklist
Review
"Clearly, neither plausibility nor coherence are priorities for Palahniuk. His subversive riffs conjure a kind of jump-cut cinema of the diseased imagination, resulting in an outlandish allegory that is as brutally hilarious as it is relentlessly bleak." Book Magazine
Review
"Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity." LA Weekly
Review
"Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences." San Francisco Examiner
About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk's four other novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, and Diary. He lives in Portland, Oregon.