Invisible Monsters

Invisible Monsters came out in 1999 as Chuck Palahniuk's third published novel, two years before the book that made his name. It was the manuscript that nearly cost him a career: his publisher turned it down for being too disturbing, and it reached print only after a later success made the earlier one commercially viable.

Its narrator, Shannon, was a model, which in this book means a woman whose value was entirely visible and is now entirely gone. She tells the story from a wedding where a house is burning down, and she circles back through how she arrived there: the shotgun wound that took her jaw, the hospital, the friend and the boyfriend who did not stay, and the speech therapy group where Brandy Alexander decided to remake her. Brandy's method involves surgery, a car, a borrowed identity and a great deal of nerve, and she teaches by example rather than by instruction.

The book is built to be disorienting. Chapters arrive out of sequence, the same scenes return changed, and characters keep reinventing themselves with new names, new faces and new stories about who they are. Palahniuk uses that structure to say something about the trade his narrator worked in, where identity is a product and the point of a person is to be looked at. The novel is also about the mechanics of that invention, the operations and doses and names people take on, treated here as both a way of surviving and a form of theft.