Review: Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread

Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread
Chuck Palahniuk

Vintage
Street: 05.01

Remember, with Chuck Palahniuk, you don’t write the rules (though we know the first one), and any contrasting thought will leave you banging your head against your own wall. Think of this world as though you were a coyote chasing a roadrunner wearing red silk pajamas. Whatever idea you have for trapping this man under a stale idea will have you slamming into boulders, bombs and walls painted to look like highways. In Palahniuk’s recent book of short stories, Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, Palahniuk takes this world and smashes it into little beings that start to exist in your head whether you like it or not. You’ll do a lot of laughing and a bit of pondering, and you’ll develop a firm control of your gag reflex. “The Facts of Life” is so explosively funny that you’ll never look at hand sanitizer the same way, and the “Toad Prince” is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read. So thank you, Chuck Palahniuk, for giving us something to laugh at, even if the punch line is our heads crashing into our own walls. –Benjamin Tilton