Choke: A Sex-Addict, Con-Artist, Psychopathic Love Story

Who hasn’t heard the one about the boy who will sleep with anything that has a vagina, who pretends to choke in nice restaurants so people will save him and maybe help him out a little financially so he can pay his mother’s ever increasing medical bills?

Even a story as tired as this comes to life when Chuck Palahniuk writes it.

The man who wrote Fight Club, yes it was a book before it was a movie, is having another novel transferred to the silver screen, Choke, and you should definitely read it first.

The movie premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize. It’s set for limited release on September 26 of this year, so you’ve got some time to read it before classes start and the first illegal copies of it find their way on to the Internet.

If you love to read this shouldn’t be a hard sell, if you’d rather watch a movie or the latest VH1 reality show this shouldn’t be a hard sell, and if you just love f**ked up sh*t then you should probably already know about Mr. Palahniuk.

Palahniuk writes about a different breed of characters, and subjects that most authors refuse to explore, and both are exponentially more deranged and messed up than anything you can find on TV and most things that come on DVD. I’m convinced that it’s simply impossible to get bored reading one of his books.

He has written about porn stars, transsexuals, sex addicts, models who had their bottom jaw shot off with a rifle, more transsexuals, witches, self-mutilating writers and so much more. Do any of those subjects interest you? They should.

He creates what should be some of the most horrible, offensive people imaginable and makes you, the reader, like them. It’s incredible. He’s like the modern day version of the Brothers Grimm—writing graphic tales that explore the darker sides of human nature that somehow give you a positive message and a sense of hope in the end.

There aren’t any Happily-Ever-Afters, but if evil step sisters were going to cut off pieces of their own feet to make a shoe fit today, Palahniuk would write about it. But there’s still that sense of hope, no matter how deranged or backwards it may seem to be.

Choke is no exception. It follows Victor Mancini as he deals with addiction, money problems, and his quest to not be a nice guy. He always asks himself, “What would Jesus not do?”

His mother is dying, he dropped out of med school after the second year because learning about all the diseases made him paranoid, and he has finally found a woman he doesn’t want to just have sex with. So many problems. And somehow at the end of this fantastic little journey, Palahniuk drops you off back in the real world feeling good about everything that just happened. Very few authors deal with subject matters this f**ked up, and absolutely none, but Palahniuk, do so while making the characters seem so real and accessible, and giving readers something constructive to take away.

Many of Palahniuk’s critics call him a nihilist, but he writes modern day fables as far as I’m concerned. Messed up, sloppy, horrible fables. But fables none the less.