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Synopsis:

Gates Foster lost his daughter, Lucy, seventeen years ago. He’s never stopped searching. Suddenly, a shocking new development provides Foster with his first major lead in over a decade, and he may finally be on the verge of discovering the awful truth.

Meanwhile, Mitzi Ives has carved out a space among the Foley artists creating the immersive sounds giving Hollywood films their authenticity. Using the same secret techniques as her father before her, she’s become an industry-leading expert in the sound of violence and horror, creating screams so bone-chilling, they may as well be real.

Soon Foster and Mitzi find themselves on a collision course that threatens to expose the violence hidden beneath Hollywood’s glamorous façade. A grim and disturbing reflection on the commodification of suffering and the dangerous power of art, THE INVENTION OF SOUND is Chuck Palahniuk at the peak of his literary powers–his most suspenseful, most daring, and most genre-defying work yet.

Review:

I used to be quite a big Chuck Palahniuk fan, my first books being Survivor and Fight Club. I read his first few books like they were the best horror literature that I’ve ever read. I read most of his earlier stuff, but quit around the time when he wrote the book about the guy waiting in line for the porn star who trying to set the world record for sleeping with the most people in a row. I kind of felt Chuck Palahniuk is for the young, and I had aged out of enjoying his new work. I still had fond memories of many of his books, particularly Haunted and Choke.

Fast forward to over a decade later. His new novel, The Invention of Sound is coming out by his new publisher, Grand Central Publishing, and I was thinking, “Maybe I should give him a try again. See what he’s up to.” I requested the ARC, and after a few days of reading, I knew that maybe it was time for me to pay attention to him again. The Invention of Sound is two stories that eventually intertwine. The first is Gates Foster trying to find his daughter, whom disappeared seventeen years earlier. He is kind of going crazy with grief, thinking that many little girls are actually his Lucy, even though Lucy would be much older than his memory of her. He spends his life trying to find her and trying to capture sex traffickers on the internet. The second story is Mitzi Ives, a person who works for Hollywood, selling screams to film productions. These screams are farmed with her special techniques, passed down to her by her father. Mitzi is a mess of a person, and her entire story seems to be her trying to find something other than herself to hold onto. These two stories crash into each other, and the novel feels like all of the characters are in a car, speeding toward a brick wall. 

I did not know that this was how Palahniuk is writing now. There is still the crazy, shock horror elements, and some of themes still seem to be about longing to belong and creating a space in a society that does not exactly what to give you that space, but there is also a maturity here that I do not recognize from some of his past works. It feels like Palahniuk might have realized that his audience is growing up, and instead of trying to go with “let’s overthrow the corporate structure,” like in Fight Club, it is “let’s prey on the biggest fears of parents and adults.” This can be the novel that brings back those older fans that have strayed away from his works while continuing to satisfy everyone with the shock and horror that he has brought since the beginning. I know that I will start following his works closely again because I feel like he is maturing with his audience. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.