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Puhlaniuk is the writer of Fight Club. If you have read any of his books, or seen the movie version of Fight Club, you know that Palahniuk has a twisted mind. But that twisted mind can effortlessly provide both shock and humor within a well written novel.

IM is about Daisy St. Patience, a beautiful actress/model turned deformed accident victim and Brandy Alexander, who is one surgery away from becoming a full woman. The two create a friendship, gives a middle finger to their pasts, and decided to travel across the country together. So far I’m only on chapter 7 of the book, but you can go here for a full review. I didn’t even read the cover, so I don’t even know what the whole book will entail. But I just wanted to share this hilarious chapter. The so far unnamed narrator “Daisy St. Patience” also known as Bump to her family, is having Thanksgiving dinner with her parents, who obviously still love her deceased brother more than they love her. Daisy’s gay brother died of AIDs, years before this dinner:

Jump way back to the last Thanksgiving before my accident when I go home to
eat dinner with my folks. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by solid food. On the dining room table, covering it all over is a tablecloth I don’t remember, a really nice dark blue damask with a lace edge. This isn’t something I’d expect my mom to buy so I ask, did somebody give this to her?

“Give what?” my mom says.

The new table cloth. It’s really nice.

My father sighs and plunges a knife into the turkey.

“It wasn’t going to be a tablecloth at first,” Mom says. Your father a I pretty much dropped the ball on our original project.”

The knife goes in again and again and my father starts to dismember our dinner.

My mom says, “Do you know what the AIDs memorial quilt is all about?”

Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.

“I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane,” Mom says. “We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it.”

“Your mother didn’t want to step on any toes,” Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. “With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn’t want to give people the wrong idea.”

My mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, “Your father
wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Share was excited
by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism.” She
says, “Really these panels are to help the people left behind.”

“Strangers are going to see us and see Shane’s name,” my dad says. “We didn’t want them thinking things.”

The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce.

“I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles,” my mom
says, “It’s the Nazi symbol for homosexuals.” She says, “Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like the female pubic hair. The black triangle does.”

My father says, “Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean
Shane was a male prostitute.”

My mom says, “We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn’t figure which.”

Yellow,” my father says, “means watersports.”

A lighter shade of blue,” Mom says, “would mean just regular oral sex.”

“Regular white,” my father says, “would mean anal.

“White could also mean Shane was excited by mean wearing underwear.”

He says, “I can’t remember which.”

We’re supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front
of us.

“Finally we just gave up,” my mom says, “and I made a nice tablecloth of the
material.”

Between the yams and the stuffing. Dad looks down at his plate and says, “Do you know about rimming?”

I know it isn’t table talk.

“And fisting?” my mom asks.

I say, I know.

We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, stuffing chock full of organs you can still recognize, cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.

“Would you pass the butter, please?” my mother says. To my father she says, “Do you know what felching is?”

“Listen,” I say. This just blurts out. Me,” I say, “I’m the last child you people have left alive so you’d better start paying attention.”

Silence

“Felching,” I lower my voice. I’m calm now. “Felching is when a man f***s you up the butt without a rubber. He shoots his load, and then plants his mouth on your anus and sucks out his own warm sperm, plus whatever lubricant and feces are present. That’s felching. It may or may not,” I add, “include kissing you to pass the sperm and fecal matter into your mouth.”

Silence

The yams are just the way I like them, sugary sweet but crunchy on top. The tuffing is a little dry. I pass my mother the butter.

My father clears his throat. “Bump,” he says, “I think ‘fletching’ is the word your mother meant.” He says, “It means to slice the turkey into very thin strips.”

I say, oh. I say, sorry.

We eat.

Invisible Monsters has been optioned as a movie. It’s supposed to be starring Jessica Biel as the disfugured Daisy St. Patience and Cillian Murphy is rumored to be playing the fabulous diva Brandy Alexander.

Choke is another creation of Palahniuk.

The film Choke was shown this past weekend at the Sundance Film Festival. I’m looking forward to seeing it
in the theaters soon. I wonder if it’ll be a cult favorite like Fight Club.