Invisible Monster

" Brandy Alexander, the long stemmed latte queen supreme of the top drawer party girls, Brandy is gushing her insides out through a bullet hole in her amazing suit jacket.You wouldn't believe how much this suit cost.The markup is about zillion percent.The suit jacket has a little peplum skirt and wide lapels and shoulders. The single breasted cut is symmetrical except for the hole pumping out blood.

Then Evie starts to sob, standing there halfway up the staircase. Evie, that deadly virus of the moment. This is one cue to look at poor Evie, poor, sad Evie, hairless and wearing nothing but ashes and circled by the wire cage of her burned-up hooked skirt. Then Evie drops the rifle. With her dirty face in her dirty hands, Evie sits down and starts to boo-hoo, as if crying will solve anything. This rifle, this is a loaded thirty-aught rifle, it clatters down the stairs and skids out into the middle of the foyer floor, spinning on its side, pointing at me, pointing at Brandy, pointing at Evie, crying.

It's not that I'm some detached lab animal just conditioned to ignore violence, but my first instinct is maybe it's not too late to dab club soda on the bloodstain.

Most of my adult life so far has been me standing on seamless paper for a raft of bucks per hour, wearing clothes and shoes, my hair done and some fashion photographer telling me how to feel.

Him yelling, give me lust, baby.

Flash.

Give me malice.

Flash.

Give me detached existentialist ennui.

Flash.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

Flash.

Probably it's the shock of seeing my own worst enemy shoot my other worst enemy is what it is. Boom, it's a win-win situation. This and being around Brandy, I've developed pretty big jones for drama."

Guess what Mr. Palahniuk...we have developed pretty big jones for drama too...and for the morbid and the macabre...for the exceptional originality and the equally terrifying inventions...for the no-holds-barred imagination and the intellectually ferocious fiction...for the eerily precise factual overtures...Not to mention the killing effect of his famed one-liners...Esoteric maybe, but No siree, it doesn't get better than this..

Note - the quoted passage is an excerpt from Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters - my favorite fictional piece of all time. For more snippets/reviews/fanlore on this work and more, watch this space...