Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

This is probably the most disturbing book by Palahniuk. It consists of a series of short stories connected by a common thread, and there is a range of quality. Some stories are pretty mediocre while others are very powerful and deeply disturbing.  Some stories could be called "horror" or "science fiction" but it is mostly about commentary on society and the psychopaths among us, which is a common theme in Palahniuk's writing. 

The most artfully disturbing story for me was the one about the Nightmare Box, which has enough hints to make it deeply creepy while never revealing what actually happens so each reader can imagine their worst possible nightmare.  Cassandra in this story takes part in a few others, less good ones, and eventually we learn that she was a previous partner of Mr. Whittier, the guy who organizes the 3 month writers retreat, which is the thread that connects all the stories, i.e. each story is told by one of the retreat participants, something like Decameron or Chaucer, or the Mary Shelly retreat where she wrote Frankenstein. 

The participants are addressed by nicknames in the connecting story which is very distracting, though in the actual stories they tell their real names are used.  The 3 month retreat is a total isolation without an opportunity to leave early, which results in multiple murders, mutiliations, psychotic breaks and cannibalism. In a previous retreat, also organized by the psychopath Mr. Whittier, the participants played tic tac toe on the chest of Cassandra by carving the board and pieces with knives into her skin and flesh. The X player won. 

Mr. Whittier is a special type of psychopath, 13 years old with an aging disease that makes him look 80 and death soon approaching he uses his condition to elicit sex from attractive female volunteers in the care home where he is institutionalized.  After having rowdy sex with them, he then blackmails them with constitutional rape to extort money under threat of telling the police and their families. He organizes the retreat to prove to God that all humans are psychopaths deep inside and because of his obsessive fear of dying alone. 

The story of the murder of the aging child actor and framing him with child porn of prepubescent Czech girls being anal-raped by grown monkeys and prepubescent Russian boys performing oral sex on old men is also especially disturbing because of the deeply sick themes, which also could be completely based on reality. Also the story of the post-op trans woman being stripped naked, held down and hand raped by a group of women attending a women's support group is deeply disturbing, especially in today's context, 20 years after it was written.

The most famous story in the collection is "Guts" which is very disturbing when read on its own (as Palahniuk has done in many public readings while asking the audience to hold its breath) but when put in the context of the other, more disturbing stories in the book - it doesn't even break in the Top 3.  It is about a boy who masturbates naked at bottom of a pool while sitting on the pool exit valve. His anus gets sucked into the exit valve and while swimming up as not to drown, the boy's entire rectum is pulled out of his body, his anus still attached to the exit valve. This necessitates a surgery to remove most of his rectum and he cannot digest heavy food like meat for the rest of his life.  His nickname is Mr. Gut-Free. 

Overall, though the quality varies, this book contains some of the most powerfully disturbing scenes in modern mainstream literature.  Not for the faint of heart. 

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

I tried. I made myself go through the first 50 pages. This book won awards and is classified as 'weird fiction' that I should like, but I couldn't continue. I actually got all three books of the trilogy set in this world, however there are too many random stuff that just takes too much effort to get used to.  The scarab-head-women-with-great-bodies is one of them, not necessarily the most undigestible. 

It seems that I like fantasy and speculative fiction books that at least have some starting point in the current reality, human universe.  I mean even in far-off books like the Dune series by Herbert, there is still Earth somewhere in the long lost past. Same with the Foundation series by Asimov.  I guess I just cannot digest books that don't have Earth and Humans somewhere in the narrative, albeit long gone.

I won't be reading many more weird fiction books that do not contain Earth and Humans. 

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

 After I read "Fight Club" and was even more amazed than the movie, which is one of my favorites, I was expecting a lot.  Great Expectations.  And that's a sure way to get disappointed which is exactly what happened here. "Choke" starts very bombastic, with all these urban legends about sexual exploits of sex addicts, however that doesn't last long, only a couple of chapters. Even the jailbird women that Victor has sex with become repetitive by the middle of the book.  His trademark choking in restaurants also becomes tired and doesn't appear much after the first third of the book, until the end when the heroes come for revenge.

The main story is about Victor and his mother who's losing her mind in a private hospital. It turns out that she is not his mother, not even in the Jesus Christ version with foreskin, but just plain stole the baby from a stroller in a mall. Also Dr. Paige is a patient, not a doctor, and is definitely not from the future, so crazy.  The reveals are definitely not as great as in "Fight Club", but then again M. Night Shamlayan could never repeat the success of "Sixth Sense" no matter how many chances he got (and wasted).

It is an easy read since Palahniuk's style is very conversational and flowing, with short sentences and not much description, but it is definitely not as satisfying as "Fight Club." I have a couple of more Palahniuk's books, and if those two don't work out either, I will give up on him.

The Telling by Ursula LeGuin

This is the sixth and last novel set in the Hainish cycle, although Ursula LeGuin said that she never intended to write a cycle; that it just happened. The novel is written about 30 years after the last Hainish novel was published and few years before Mrs. LeGuin's death. LeGuin is famous for the "soft" science fiction she writes.  The focus is not on technology, science or exploration, but on the inter-person relationships, community dynamics and tradition. Many of her science fiction novels are parables for the treatment of indigineous groups here, on planet Earth, by the colonizing powers, like for example in "The Word for the World is Forest". 

"The Telling" is pretty much a straight-forward critique of the Chinese Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution in Communist China and the overall contemporary social order and priorities of Communist China.  It starts on the "planet" Aka, with one main continent and a capital in the city of Dovza, which is a stand-in for Peking/Beijing including a huge square in the middle (Tiananmen) where horrible execustions have happened.

The Dovzan government, which calls itself "The Corporation" and its citizens "consumer-producers" is hell-bent on modernizing their society so they can catch up with the Hainish and the other advanced races of the Ekumen. To this purpose they destroyed all of their traditional culture, burned all the traditional books, murdered or imprisoned the sages of traditional wisdom called 'maz'. The Dovzan Corporation allows only culture that directly supports the Corporation and its project "Road to the Stars" while everything else is suppressed or destroyed.

The protagonist, Sutty, is a lesbian Indian woman from Terra (Earth), which grew up during a period of counter-revolution against the Ekumen and the Hainish where religious extremists and terrorists called "The Unists" took over the entire planet and murdered most scientists and free thinking people in the name of their "God".  Sutty studies in a Vancouver Hainish University within the "Pale" of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is under the direct protection of the Hainish, so she is largely sparred the religious terrorism and horror of the Unists, but her partner is murdered during a terrorist attack on the Vancouver Library district. 

She is sent as a Hainish/Ekumen representative to Aka, but because in LeGuin's Hainish universe there is no faster than light travel (only NAFAL - Nearly As Fast As Light), it takes about 65 years in real time for her to arrive, while in her subjective time only a few months pass.  During this time the Dovzan Corporation has taken over Aka in a violent revolution and proceeded to murder everyone that is even slightly opposed to its principles, while The Unist Government on Earth has been overthrown with the help of an emissary from the Hainish (originally Terran) which the "fathers" of The Unists proclaim to be "God".

Sutty travels to the last part of Aka where traidtional knowledge is kept called Ozkat-Okzat, which is a stand-in for Communist Chinese-occupied Tibet, where she meets the surviving maz and is introduced to their traditional knowledge.  The entire time she is closely followed and surveilled by Dovzan Corporation agents, the top being "The Monitor" who tries to prevent her from hearing any authentic stories from the indigenous people of Ozkat-Okzat. Eventually Sutty learns the horrible truth about brutal murders of the Monitor's grandparents by the Government (orchestrated by his own father) that made him a broken man, with only path to blindly propagate the programming of the Corporation.  This mirrors the happenings in Communist China, especially during the (Un)Cultural Revolution where children were betraying their own parents to the Government and having them imprisoned or even executed. 

The book ends with Sutty collecting all the traditional knowledge and books of Aka from the maz of Ozkat-Okzat and sending them to the Ekumen where they are to be preserved until the inevitable fall and destruction of the Corporation of Dovza and return to the traditional values on Aka. 

This is a much slower book than the previous ones in the Hainish Cycle, without much action or fighting, but the detail and attention with which the Aka societies are described makes them a living, breathing entity, on par with any real society on Earth. 

Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter

 After reading a lot of articles on Reddit about Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, the consensus was that his novels are an "acquired taste" and not for everyone who doesn't feel like waddling through dozens of pages of bad prose while tries and fails to build relatable characters. The Reddit users recommended his "connected" collection of short stories "Vacuum Diagrams".

This collection consists of many short stories written over the span of decades, most of them connected to the Xeelee, at least tangentially, and brought together by the first story where the Silver Ghosts are conducting a new forbidden experiment, and the protagonist's dead wife retells him the entire human story in the current universe, starting from billions of years ago and finishing a billion years in the future when the Photino Birds finally win and extinguish all Baryonic matter in this universe.

Some of the stories are silly, and can be seen that they were written long time ago, when the author was young.  Some are pretty good, but overall it is a very enjoyable book, since each story (almost) has different characters which cannot be developed in the given length, so you don't really miss them as you would in a novel. 

Many of the stories are the beginnings of the large novels Baxter wrote.  For example, the story "Raft" is the first chapter of the novel "Raft".  If you enjoy  the Xeelee concept with its technology on a super-advanced level that is barely comprehensible today, but do not want to wade through thousands of pages of boring characters as in the novels - this book gives you an overview of the entire timeline and just the nuggets you want.

Raft by Stephen Baxter

I started this book as it is the first in the "Xeelee" sequence, which is supposed to be one of the most far-fetching SciFi ever written, helped with Baxter's background in Physics, but it is just too much of a torture.  Kindle says I'm 29% in and I am calling it quits. It is just a badly written book.  Rees is probably one of the most boring characters ever created, along with the Pilot and the Scientist.  The two women (only two) in this novel are caricatures. The science of the Nebula, the Belt and the Raft is passably interesting, but it could have been a 5-page short story (yes, I know this novel is based on an earlier short story).

Even though the Xeelee do not appear in this book, just like the Heechee, they are more interesting when read about in a Wikipedia article than a novel.  Just like the Heechee kids are wearing a metal diaper for microwave radiations, the Xeelee seem to have a penchant for black holes and baryonic (?) matter.  Baxter is just a bad writer.  His prose is bad. The few interesting ideas here and there cannot compensate for the ennui of wading through his cumbersome and uninteresting prose.

I think I am going to switch back to detective fiction for a little while. 

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

 This is the first book in the "Culture" series, which consists of about a dozen novels and a bunch of short stories, which Banks worked on until his death a few years ago.  Banks said that he was tired of dystopian version of the future in sci-fi literature where machines and AI rise against man, so he wanted to create a world where the machines and AI are benevolent, help the humans and protect them.  He built "The Culture" with that basic idea in mind, but also set it in a realistic universe where there are other races, civilizations and alliances which are against the ideas of the Culture and there are brutal, bloody wars. This book in particular is about the Culture-Idirian war, which had close to 900 billion casualties. 

My general idea of the style of Banks' writing is that it is somewhere between Star Wars and Hitch-hikers' guide, the second being foundational British Sci-Fi and Banks is Scottish.  Although technology is emphasized - it is definitely not at the level of Asimov, but more emphasis is placed on adventure, swash-buckling heroes (Horza) who get themselves into difficult situations and the bravely, and by the skin of their teeth, get out of them victorious.  Btw, my personal preference is for short, dynamic, explosive descriptions of fight scenes, but Banks has completely opposite idea, where single fight of 10-14 mins is described over 4-5 pages, with every minute detail described profusely. 

This first book is about a Changer, Horza, who work for the Idirians against The Culture, and Balveda, a Culture Agent from "Special Circumstances" (basically military intelligence).  The Culture has no military and uses no money since it is 'coordinated' rather than 'ruled' by "Minds" which are advanced, sentient AIs which exist in multiple dimensions, think faster than light, and have storage capacity the size of an average planet.  Changers are humanoids which can change their outer appearance (over several days) to ideally represent any other humanoid they've observed.  The lore says they are a remnant of some genetically-modified population from some forgotten war, thousands of years in the past.  They are living weapons, having venomous teeth and nails and can also spit venom. 

Idirians are tri-pedal giants with saddle-like heads and redundant organs for every function, a result of evolving on an extremely inhospitable planet, which gives them biological immortality (i.e. no aging or disease death, but definitely death from being murdered or destroyed in an accident).  They are a theocracy and religion/God is the main pillar around which their society and personal lives are organized.  This makes them natural enemies of The Culture, which is Atheist by nature, and also proselytizing their ideas across the Galaxy. 

There are many adventures throughout the book that Horza gets himself in, like with the Eaters, Game of Damage, Kraiklyn's Free Company, Balveda's infiltration and Horza's escape from Culture's transporter.  Horza is not the typical Star Wars hero, as he is at times selfish and murders to achieve his goals, but we still end up sympathizing with him.  The background onto which he exists is much more murderous and self-aggrandizing, so he comes out as a moderate by comparison.

Horza dies at the end.  His entire species of Changers is completely destroyed by the end of the Culture-Idiran war and does not figure in future books, except as a remembrance.