Dark Diary

CHUCK PALAHNIUK'S FABLE OF DREAD

In days of yore, sailors and their wives kept diaries of every day they were separated from one another. So when her husband falls into a coma, Misty Wilmot, the heroine of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new novel from Doubleday, Diary, writes one, too. Misty is a blocked artist working as a maid. Worse, her husband's strange habit, pre-coma, of "stealing" rooms in houses he remodeled—he'd cover their walls with hate graffiti, then seal the rooms off with plaster—has yielded a flurry of lawsuits. One lady just called to complain she's lost her breakfast nook ... No, you don't expect anything normal to happen in a Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced "Paula-nick") novel. In Lullaby, reciting an ancient African poem, or "culling song," results in others' instant death; Choke's antihero pretends to choke on food in upscale restaurants so diners will "save" him and send him support checks. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Palahniuk is a bracingly toxic purveyor of dread and mounting horror. He makes nihilism fun. If the tales of this Oregon-based satirist—who recently published a book about Portland, his adopted hometown, called Fugitives and Refugees (Crown)—are sometimes overstuffed with ghoulish effect, their author makes up for it by being an inventive stylist and by weaving fascinating facts into his narratives—for example, in Diary, we learn why the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. On the biographical front, it comes as no great surprise that the author's family history evokes the word "curdle": Palahniuk's grandfather shot and killed his wife and then himself while their son, Palahniuk's father, hid under a bed; years later, the father and a woman he'd met through a personals ad were killed by her ex-husband. Dark roots for a dark writer, -HENRY ALFORD

HENRY ALFORD

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