Not Forever, But For Now

April 1, 2023

Wealthy brothers Otto and Cecil grow up in the Welsh countryside, copycatting their grandfather, playing with their pony, and killing the staff. This is, after all, a family of professional assassins, and with their father having vanished in the Ghost Forest and their mother having vanished into an opioid haze, their grandfather is prepping the youngsters to take over. Not surprisingly, Palahniuk offers a horror satire, though it's BISACed literary--aiming for a broad audience. Prepub Alert.

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July 17, 2023
Palahniuk (The Invention of Sound) delivers a grisly yet hazy satire of slasher stories. Two 20-something brothers embrace a murderous strain of arrested development in their upper-crust household in present-day Wales, where they listen to stories from their contract killer grandfather, who claims to have offed Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, and other celebrities. Despite their ages, the brothers still have governesses, and Cecil, who narrates, looks on while his older sibling, Otto, stabs one of them to death. Cecil also recounts Otto’s other killings, among them a landscaper and the family’s dog. There are also heavy-handed hints about the brothers’ incest. Episodes in the plotless mélange include Otto and Cecil creating a deranged lottery system for their neighbors, where the winner is killed in front of the other players, and their grandfather’s ill-advised attempt to force Otto into the killing-for-hire racket. Palahniuk’s unflinching approach to the macabre material is sure to please many of his fans, but the gratuitous violence and aimless narrative won’t win any new ones. Fight Club this is not. Agent: Sloan Harris and Dan Kirschen, ICM Partners.

July 1, 2023
Otto and Cecil spend their days watching nature documentaries in the nursery of their family's manse in the Welsh countryside. The voice of their childhood is that of Richard Attenborough, softly narrating how the baby giraffe is about to be feasted upon by a pride of lions. The boys are attended to by a team of nannies, tutors, cooks, and butlers, most of whom meet an untimely end. This being a Palahniuk novel, the boys are also well into adulthood, somewhere between "a mewling tot and a drooling codger" yet remain in a state of suspended childhood since daddy disappeared and they stopped tracking time. Calendars are not advanced; birthdays are no longer celebrated. The boys are expected to take over the family business of bumping off celebrities who are "damaging their brand." Past "clients" include Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Di. Palahniuk expresses a coal-black humor that unsparingly and brilliantly satirizes contemporary society. The uninitiated reader might find some content objectionable--the very same satirical content Palahniuk's legion of fans has come to expect and relish.

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August 1, 2023
A pair of infantile, homicidal brothers decide to take over the family business. Aiming Palahniuk's profanely giddy rhetoric at the tea-and-crumpets crowd popularized by Downton Abbey and its ilk sounds like more fun than it turns out to be here. The book utterly unloads with both barrels in a sadistic folktale that aims to satirize homophobia, celebrity death culture, and the British class system all at once, but this much transgressive glee might be more than readers expect. To listen to their rhetoric at the beginning of this short novel, one might think Otto and Cecil really are the "twee, feeble, measly boys" they imagine themselves to be, complete with a nanny to bathe them and tuck them in at night in their manor in the Welsh countryside. It's a different picture once you get past unreliable narrator Cecil's flowery prose and realize the wee brothers are actually 20-something young men with a freakish, drug-addicted mother and a patently far-fetched predilection for rape, sodomy, and the lash. They also apparently have a future in the family business, where their grandfather Sir Richard supposedly manages the course of history. From Kent State to the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis, we learn all these pivotal events were the result of the family trade --their mother responsible for flashing a strobe light in a Parisian tunnel, or their grandfather administering a phenobarbital and champagne enema to Judy Garland in 1969. "Those misdeeds that need doing," as Cecil explains, include the deaths of figures like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and Diana, Princess of Wales, among others. If the history askew doesn't grab you, by all means stay for the plethora of servant murders ("Then there was the year the maid got herself killed. Don't ask me which") or the rapists and killers Otto goads into visiting or the tutor Otto buggers so senseless that he gives himself over to the little bastards' ministrations to make him more like them. A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch.

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