Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters Remix is a fantastic printed object that deserves space in the canon of American postmodern fiction. It is the 1999 version of Invisible Monsters in its original intended form, which asks the reader to jump back and forth throughout the volume, kind of like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book from the 1980s. For instance, the end of the introduction instructs the reader to “jump to Chapter Forty-one,” where the novel begins. The end of that chapter directs the reader to another chapter, eventually culminating in the final chapter near the middle of the volume, which is marked “The End” in place of further direction.
However, this chapter sequence only covers the chapters from the original novel. There are around ten (I’m too lazy to go back and count!) new chapters interspersed throughout the book, some that extend the story of the novel and some that describe its original composition and how the idea for the Remix came about. If one has not been paying attention to which chapters have been read, it is easy to miss these new chapters. But the introduction suggests marking each read page with an X, which is what I did, and then I went through the book looking to check if there were any unread pages, thus discovering the new chapters. There are three sequences of new chapters that loop back on themselves, so the reader could begin with any of the chapters in the sequence and still encounter all of the chapters (e.g., I began the first sequence with chapter three because it was the first unread chapter that I discovered, and the last chapter I read in the sequence directed me back to chapter three, so even if I had begun with a different chapter in the sequence I still would have gotten to all of its chapters).
Two of the new sequences involve pages that are printed backwards so that the reader must use a mirror to read them.
Palahniuk acknowledges that readers “older, than, say, twenty-two” will hate this gimmick (104), but I love it! I appreciate books that try to stretch the limit of what a physical book can be, which is why I like the Remix so much. It combines elements of previous postmodern texts such as B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Even if one is not a fan of Palahniuk, the Remix is worth reading because of how it tries to break through the novel’s conventional generic form.
Daniel Shank Cruz 