Product Description

She's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4260 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Bret Easton Ellis
‘Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo’

Booklist
‘This is a wild ride of a novel’

New York Newsday
‘Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time.'

Customer Reviews

Wacked out and fun
If you're new to Chuck Palahniuk's work, might I suggest that you read some of the reviews and even do some online research before diving right into his work, the reason being that he is unlike any other author. The phrase "pulls no punches" comes to mind. I read somewhere that this was actually Mr. Palahniuk's first novel, but that it had been rejected by publishers because it was too out there, too violent, and too weird. As a result he wrote FIGHT CLUB, which has since become a classic of the underground sort, and publishers flocked to pick up INVISIBLE MONSTERS. Now Mr. Palahniuk has several books under his belt, and this is by far one of the better ones.

The story of a fashion model gone wrong, the author uses fashion lingo and punches up the story with brilliant writing techniques that really give you at once a feeling of the vapidity of the industry, the falseness, and also the underlying problems, both emotional and physical. This is not a hard book to read, but, like most books, it took me a chapter or two to get into the flow and style. Once there I had no problem folliwing what was coming, though there are surprises galore in this tawdry and fantantasic tale. Everyone in the book is a mess, but the author somehow gets us to like and follow them through this labyrinth of weirdness.

The book has an almost hallucinatory feel, reminding me of THE ELECTRIC KOOLAID TEST, or even some of Burrough's works---NAKED LUNCH comes to mind, though INVISIBLE MONSTERS makes more sense and is more fun. I would recommend this book to those who have a warped sense of humor and who are not easily offended, along with Sedaris's works (ME TALK PRETTY) and those of Christopher Moore.

My only hesitation with recommending this book is that there is one scene, one description of a sexual act that I hope is not frequently performed, and this was the only part that really turned me off. Other than that, it was a wild ride of a time.

Style over substance
This is not an easy book to get into and not at all what I expected. I had never read a Chuck Palahniuk book before but impressed with recommendations from friends who had raved about fight club, I thought I'd give this a whirl when I saw it in my local book shop despite the premise of a tale of disfigured models and drag queens on a road trip to hell and back. The quality of the writing is undoubted and the plot twists and turns to the big finale, but some of the "twists" are obvious from quite early on and I found all of the characters to be thoroughly unpleasant. As such, I didn't give a damn about any of them and this book did not inspire me to stay up late wanting to read just one more chapter to see what happened next. Less than 300 pages long but it took me an age to plod through it. Hate to say it, but this book has put me off reading any of his others.

see through good
i was so impressed by this book that i will now be reading everything Chuck Palahniuk wrote. He's now one of my favorite writers, along with Christopher Moore and Jackson McCrae.

"Invisible Monsters" is a really twisted work that everyone should read. You WILL be put off by some of the humor and references to sex, but that's part of Palahniuk's deal. I can tell you, even if you don't like some of the sections in this book, the coming together at the end makes up for it.

The basic idea of the book is about a fashion model who has become disfigured. Palahniuk uses fashion-type references throughout and the word "Flash!" to denote the fashion world or the remnants of it. A truly well thought out book from cover to cover. I would also recommend the Christopher Moore book "Practical Demon Keeping" and the McCRae "Katzenjammer" for other equally entertaining reads.