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Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters Remix

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All type irregularities in the text are intended

The Wish Book: A Reintroduction to Invisible Monsters

As opposed to you, you who’ll always stay so young and hip.

Be that as it may. This modern world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Nowadays, whatever purchase you moon over, whatever person you lust after, most likely it’s presented on a smooth glass or plastic screen. On a laptop or a television. And no matter what the technology, you’ll catch sight of your own reflection. In that electric mirror, there hovers your faint image. You’ll be superimposed over every email. Or, lurking in the glassy surface of online porn, there you are. Fewer people shut down their computers anymore, and who can blame them? The moment that monitor goes black, you’re looking at yourself, not smiling, not anything. Here’s your worst-ever passport photo enlarged to life size. Swimming behind the eBook words of Jane Austen, that slack, dead-eyed zombie face, that’s yours. That’s you.

The Sears catalogue was better. The paper reflected nothing. You could lose yourself in the Sears catalogue. The one published for the Christmas season they called the “Wish Book,” and seldom has a name been more accurate because it held hundreds of pages of toys and food and clothes, tools, and you-name-it. You could never remember it all, and every time you opened that book you found something you’d never seen before. Every time you cracked those pages you fell in love. Children and young people are always looking for an anchor, a tether, some attachment to ground them in the impossible world. The objects in the Sears catalogue baited you into adulthood.

You couldn’t wait to find a job, any job, and start buying stuff. The vastness of stuff was unknowable. It was the world.

That’s how I originally structured this book: to be a little unknowable. Reader friends complained about how the dwindling number of pages, those physical sheets of paper you held between the thumb and index finger of your right hand, suggested when the plot of a novel was reaching its climax. At the time I had no washing machine. We’re talking 1991. I took my dirty clothes to a Laundromat called City Laundry every Tuesday after work. The place was cluttered with old magazines, old Vogue magazines brought in by the owner, Gretchen. They were the only reading material, and I tried reading them. The pages were seldom numbered. The pages were chockablock with artsy photos and quotes, enlarged and lifted out of context. In articles, the feature copy started near the front of the magazine but quickly “jumped” to pages near the back. Trying to read a story was like trying to navigate through a Las Vegas casino. It was designed to entice and seduce you. It was designed to trap you. I got lost. I loved it. I told myself, Why can’t a novel do this?