Fight Club and Adjustment Day author Chuck Palahniuk's The Invention of Sound is a surreal horror novel that will fascinate and repulse its readers by equal shares. Mitzi Ives is a Foley artist who records the best scream sound effects for the Hollywood machine, by the most violent means possible. She's also a woman on the brink: masochistic, drug-addled and psychotic. Meanwhile, Gates Foster, an investigator who tracks pedophiles, wants nothing more than to avenge the disappearance, and presumed death, of his daughter. As the two race toward one another on a reckless collision course, a nefarious cast, including an actor, a producer and a doctor with their own agendas, influences the two.
Like Palahniuk's best works, The Invention of Sound is a cacophony of visceral horror. Skipping through scenes that are progressively cringe-worthy and gag-inducing, the narrative keeps a relentless pace as characters become villainous and pathetic, detestable and yet uncomfortably recognizable. In what may be Palahniuk's best fusion of style and concept, the novel's surreal metaphors-made-real, both on a sentence-level and throughout the plot, create a sense that even the mundane cannot avoid being corrupted. From the moment Mitzi mistakes a pill sweat-stamped to skin for a pus-filled boil to the novel's explosive ending, Palahniuk is not so much full of surprises as he is full of fearless revelations. The story's brilliance in concept and prose comes, then, not from producing cheap twists, but from its ability to demonstrate how everything is, as we all fear, exactly what it seems. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor