Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Choke is definitely not an easy pill to swallow. Just the fact that its title commands you to quit your obnoxious breathing, is indicative of its attitude towards the human race, and that includes you dear reader. Of course as always it is sugarcoated by Palahniuk’s engaging, almost trance-inducing writing. Here it is at its needle point sharp best. He certainly seems to revel in his own sentence structures, to a point where every line seems to be but a part of a sequence formulation. Obsessive isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind. Even the rollicking catch phrases however, fail to lighten the mood of dark perversion, inevitable betrayal and general dejection in this novel. Whereas in most of Chuck’s novels one can at least see the light at the end of the tunnel of wretched human existence that he is so fond of exploring due to their fill of wry humor, here you just know that the light is most likely to be a train. As you follow Victor Mancini on his downward spiral through sexual addiction, choking in restaurants, messianic delusions and huge mommy issues one begins to lose sight of the surface. The affirmation is delivered in unconvincing terms, the hole Mancini spends the novel’s length digging for himself seems just too deep to suddenly climb out of. In the end the novel ends up stuck somewhere in your esophagus and you don’t know whether to cry, chuckle or spit it out all together. It is a familiar feeling with Palahniuk’s novels, except this one is just so aptly named. Perhaps he will continue to release his bile filled vendettas until we really do choke, as I suspect was his intention all along.