SNUFF

 Chuck Palahniuk. SNUFF.

600+ eager men await the call for their turn to participate in a world-record gang bang video. The rumour is that someone will die.

I read it for the style. Each chapter is the voice of a different character and POV. The studs, identified by number, each have a symbol. The boy carries roses. The old anchor man. The autographed dog guy. The has-been porn star. The wrangler, Sheila, has a clipboard. The waiting woman, Cassie Wright. The running joke stitching each chapter together is the perversion of movie titles used to sell porn videos. 

True to what Palahniuk has made such a successful career out of, the sticky smelly claustrophobic room is a wasteland of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual poverty. Very convincing.

THE NOEL DIARY

 Richard Paul Evans. THE NOEL DIARY.

A successful writer inherits his estranged mother's house and goes home to Salt Lake City to prepare it for sale. And maybe to do some digging, to try to find out what happened. Why his father abandoned them. Why his mother rejected him. While he is there, he meets a young woman looking for her birth mother and the two research together after finding the missing mother's diary in the dead mother's house.

THE FLOOD

Ian Rankin. THE FLOOD. 

Because of our recent "atmospheric rivers" and catastrophic flooding, it would be easy to think that it was this title which attracted me. But no. It is the author. It seems much of a popular writer's early work gets re-issued to catch the wave. 

This novel is described in the writer's updated intro as "literary" so that too attracts me. How will it differ from his popular crime fiction, especially my fav character, Rebus?

Hmm. I have to think about that. Alex, the mother, and Sandy, the just coming-of-age teen boy, in a Scottish town which has lost its one industry, coal. 

Alex is a single mother in her early thirties who has survived the town's gossip about bad luck, witchcraft, and the mystery of her pregnancy. Who is the father? How did her own father die? Is incest involved? 

This was the first of a three-book trend for me in this post-writing pre-holiday season. The subject of identity and the role an absent or unknown parent plays in a young person's growth.