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From Amazon.com
Speaking of little black boxes, Skinnerians would have a field day with the presenting behavior of the folks who make up Palahniuk's world. They pretend they're suicide hotline operators for fun. They eat lobster before it's quite... done. They dance in morgues. The Cleavers they are not. Scary as they might be, these characters are ultimately more scared of themselves than you are, and that's what makes them so fascinating. In the wee hours and on lonely highways, they exist in a perpetual twilight, caught between the horror of the present and the dread of the unknown. With only two novels under his belt, Chuck Palahniuk is well on his way to becoming an expert at shining a light on these shadowy creatures. --Bob Michaels --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
And so here is my confession. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Palahniuk's BEST book!,
By Ben C. Randal (Canon City, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Survivor: A Novel (Paperback)
I've read both Choke and Fight Club, in that order, and I have to say, Survivor beats them both outright. You don't read this book, you hop on and ride the madness until you get off, either satisfied or nauseous, depending on your personality. This book lets you know the protagonist is doomed from the very beginning. It opens from Flight 2039, about to crash in the Australian outback, with only one person remaining aboard: Tender Branson. He tells his story to the black box on board with him, and to us, as the chapter numbers count down. Tender is a survivor of the Creedish "death cult", who were supposedly religious fanatics who sold their children for labor, and then committed mass suicide when the authorities came to intervene. We weave through his life, seventeen to late thirties. It begins with him working as cleaning houses of the wealthy, keeping quiet about disturbing secrets of his employers. He steals fake flowers from graveyards, runs a help hotline telling everyone calling to kill themselves, and is visited by a social worker. He ends up a media superstar with a body that's half surgically enhanced, blurred by hundreds of combinations of drugs. And that's the mild stuff. Chuck Palahniuk fills his books with frightening, little known trivia about the real world. How to get blood stains out of fur, how to scam Ronald McDonald Houses, how to get drugs from veterinarians. He then surrounds these facts with his fiction, making the story seem more real and more disturbing. Survivor is completely unpredictable, unique, and darkly hilarious. I'll say this right now: I think it's brilliant. The insights and food for thought it provides make me laugh aloud and chill me. Palahniuk comments on society, he mocks society, without preaching once. The characters do things you dream to do in your darkest or most honest moments, but wouldn't dare. The storyline shocks you, takes twists and turns you'd never guess and I couldn't reveal here. A typical paragraph of Survivor goes like this: A downside is that Chuck Palahniuk uses a lot of repetition to make points, and while usually pulls it off excellently, occasionally it can get irritating or dull. It also doesn't have too much rereading value - after once or twice the thrill dulls and you don't feel like reading it again. Also, it is not for the faint at heart. It is fairly graphic and has the ability to shred most optimism. Some people have complained about how ambiguous the ending was, but I think that if he'd given it a solid ending the effect would have been weaker. Okay. Enough. I loved it. Go find a copy and start reading it. If you liked his other work, you will definitely enjoy Survivor. Another recent Amazon pick I really enjoyed is The Losers Club: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez -- a totally obscure, totally great book that I can't stop thinking about. Highly recommended.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The guy just can't miss,
By Tate Billingham (Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Survivor: A Novel (Paperback)
I stumbled on SURVIVOR after a friend left the book at my house one afternoon. After reading this book, a(nother) Palahniuk addict was born. The only other author I’ve done this with was Jackson McCrae—think, his KATZENJAMMER which is somewhat Palahniuk-like. I was so intrigued by the twisted language and oddly found knowledge, I loved it (SURVIVOR). I couldn't take my eyes off the book, I'm sure it took me all of 2 days to read through the unfortunate but entertaining life of Creedish Death Cult 'Survivor' Tender Branson. I would suggest this book to anyone, and definitely any other of Palahniuk's books.
1.0 out of 5 stars
I survived this garbage...,
This review is from: Survivor: A Novel (Paperback)
I have read a lot of books and a lot of Chuck's books and I have never come across anything so over hyped. This book is aweful, don't waste you time or money. Boring, so boring... Imagine the movie Kingpin only full of meaningless fill and diatribes, with characters that still don't learn anything from the experience. Someone here said it was better than fight club? Maybe if you don't like fighting? The characters were barely developed, more effort was put into house cleaning tips than plot. This seems like it was a short story expanded out into a waste of my time novel.
The plot isn't even remotely believable and neither is the background story. Cults don't send their members away, and children don't become sexless slaves from being exposed to child birth - chidren havn't always been so sheltered from such things. It's a pathetic foundation for a writter of this supposed calibre. I have never been this disapointed in a piece of writting. Don't buy this....read the Raw Shark Texts instead, its hard to put down not hard to pick up.
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