Invisible Monsters is a very unique book with unique characters that reads like poetry. It is very obvious that it was fun for Chuck to write and is full of dark humour and turns of phrase. It's also "Musically Repetitive", full of sonic intensity!
To bad it's not audio. It doesn't go over well at all in a print media. I was so bored by the half-way point in this book I started listing all the "refrains" in the margins. There are at least three, up to twenty, depending on how you count. At times, the book seems to be a collection of quotes... from itself. Perhaps this would have been good as a performance, where these repetitions would have been able to sonically build, but I think it is still too long for so many repeats. But, like I said, I'm sure it was fun to write.
The 'unique characters' didn't make the book any more enjoyable. They aren't... realistic enough. But there are plenty of unrealistic characters I like. Gandalf comes to mind; or Luke Skywalker, even. But they are unrealistic in a different way. They work in the world that is created by the book, which itself is deep enough to sustain them. These characters are in a world sorta like earth, except far shallower, and they can't even really swim in that pool. They lack any and all depth, are all pretty much each other, and have no life outside of this story. Now, a literalist would tell me, "of course they don't. They don't exist anywhere outside of the story." But, as a literatureist, I say, "they exist in your imagination." Except these characters don't. They profess to have motivations, but I can't believe that they are real, I just don't buy it.
It is a very small world full of amazing coincidences. Everything ties back into itself. Everything comes back. I like that sort of thing, but even that is really overdone. I still find it the most impressive part of the book. Before I finished the book, I thought I wouldn't have anything good to say about it; I didn't think it would ever surprise me, no matter how much it was trying. But the ending is good. Just not worth reading the book.
Even the humor, the big selling point of the book, wasn't enjoyable. Though I do respect it. Again, I think it would have gone over better as a performance. There are lines that I read, and only realized the joke after I was on to the next sentence. They are good jokes, but... I think it was the surrounding pacakge, the mood that it put me in, that prevented me from even seeing the humor in the best of Chuck's jokes. But it is filled with dark humor. If you are into that, this may be one of the best books you ever read. If you can get over the repetition, repetition, repetition.
All in all, this book was a complete failure for me. One of the least enjoyable reads I can remember. Aside from Patricia Cornwell's Black Notice. That was really awful.
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