Reviews tagging 'Gore'

Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

1 review

its_kievan's review against another edition

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challenging dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

At one point in this story, one character injects another character's penis with spider venom, which causes it to rot and eventually fall off. This is a good analogy for Adjustment Day as a whole, except replace the penis with my attention span and the spider venom with one of the most toothless, incoherent attempts at satire I've ever read. It's just... it's bad. It's bad and it's not particularly clever or interesting. Good satire comes from caring about the subject, at least a little. You need to know a lot about something to criticize it well, and that's doubly true when you're trying to be funny in the process. Palahniuk, as far as I can tell, doesn't really give a shit about... well, about anything, and it shows. Adjustment Day is the sort of equal-opportunity mockery that you'd find on South Park, and as a result it reads like a high school student's report on a book they didn't even read. It's lazy, and it's boring. I'm sure somewhere there's an Adjustment Day fan - probably the same person whose response to Fight Club was "whoa dude that's so sick" - but personally I couldn't care less. I couldn't care less what Palahniuk thinks about masculinity, or about liberalism, or about identity politics, and I couldn't care less about his book.

Also he has two characters in this book talk about Fight Club, which is so blindingly obnoxious it nearly killed me.
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