Choke: Summary and book reviews of Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, plus links to an excerpt from Choke and a biography of Chuck Palahniuk.

From the author of the international sensation Fight Club, a powerful (and hilarious) novel about love and strife between mothers and sons, the addictive power of sex, the terrors of aging, the ugly truth about historical theme parks, and much else... Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's controversial and blazingly original debut novel, introduced a fresh and even renegade talent to American fiction, one who has retooled the classic black humor of Terry Southern and Kurt Vonnegut for the lunacy of the millennial age. In his new novel, Choke, he gives readers a vision of life and love and sex and mortality that is both chillingly brilliant and teeth-rattlingly funny. Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's elder care: Pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves you" will feel responsible for the rest of his life. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of checks, week in, week out. Between fake choking gigs, Victor works at Colonial Dunsboro with a motley group of losers and stoners trapped in 1734, cruises sex addiction groups for action ("You put twenty sexaholics around a table night after night and don't be surprised."), and visits his mother, whose anarchic streak made his childhood a mad whirl and whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his (possibly divine?) parentage. An antihero for our deranging times, Victor's whole existence is a struggle to wrest an identity from overwhelming forces. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

Media Reviews

Book - Don McLeese Even though the author's excesses and repetitions occasionally grate on the reader's nerves, it's hard not to love a guy whose bordello of the subconscious spawns hypno lap dances with the likes of Emily Dickinson and Eleanor Roosevelt.   L.A. Weekly Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity.   San Francisco Examiner Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms.   Newsday Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humor, DeLillo's mordant social analysis, and Pynchon's antic surrealism (or is it R. Crumb's?) into a gleaming puzzle palace all his own.   Library Journal His writing is as good and as funny as ever, and like many other Palahniuk characters, Victor is quite memorable. Some readers may be shocked and even repulsed by much of the subject matter here.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated of 5 by Melissa
Down and Dirty
Only 2 of the participating 4 members of our book club would read this one. They were turned off by the vulgarity of the first part of the book. While I must say I was initially uncomfortable with it, I understand the necessity in the language in...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Mattie
Fantastic
the thing i like about chuck palahniuk's writing is his dark and perverse humor. i loved fight club and invisible monsters. choke did not let me down. it's something you have to read and have an open mind about. it's intriguing and addictive.

Rated of 5 by jaydilla
Mr. Palahnuik's novels often examine the pychosis that accompanies everyday people living ordinary lives. Fight Club examined the psychosis of violence in young men who find, not satisfaction, but rather, alienation and rage in conforming to the...   Read More

Rated of 5 by morphion
Having never read any other works of Palahniuk, I was not what you might call prepared for Choke. Being 15 years of age, I was beginning to grow accustomed to novels that brought up strange, disturbing concepts and images, but in relation to Choke,...   Read More

Rated of 5 by big bill
wow--this is one ridiculous book. a sensationalist piece of junk that should make any fan of so-called "modern literature" shake his head with frustration. contrived, silly, unimpostrant, and most decidedly not a satire. well, maybe at...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Sy'rah
Palahniuk's novel Choke is both thouroughly encahnting and repulsive. His quick and blunt prose is just enough to make some people sqeamish, but if you stay along for the ride, you won't be disappointed. The plot twists that ensue...   Read More

...8 More Reader Reviews

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