Fight Club 2 – Chuck Palahniuk

Fight Club 2 picks up ten years after the events of the original novel.  Marla and the narrator – now going by Sebastian – have started a family.  Nowadays, the aforementioned Sebastian is heavily medicated due to the events of the first book.  However, in need of a “good lay”, Marla begins switching up her husband’s medication with sugar pills hoping that the man she first loved returns to form.  As you can imagine, things go pear shaped pretty quickly.

I don’t even know where to begin with this.

This was bad.  Really, really bad.  It flat out sucked and I hated it.

I’d honestly like to know if anyone was even asking for this.  For starters, the original Fight Club is a pretty damn good novel.  It’s a great standalone story that kick started Chuck’s career and launched him into literary super stardom.  Since this novel, he’s written some pretty compelling stuff like Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke and Lullaby – so why go back to the first novel?  Was it money?  Were his fans asking him for this?  It certainly wasn’t because he had a good idea for a story because this was awful.

I think the end of the book is where I completely lost my patience.  I understand at a base level what Chuck was going for, but it felt self-indulgent and gross.  This was so far off from the original book that it felt almost like a parody – and maybe that was what Chuck was going for.  It just felt so deeply and wholly unnecessary.  I hate that I even finished it.

In terms of a level of expectation I had going in coupled with the constant meta bullshit storytelling, this might be the worst book I’ve ever read.