Madeline
It took me a bit to get into the flow of Make Something Up, a book of disturbing short stories. As I have mentioned in a previous post, I enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk in my youth. He was my favorite author. It was this very post that caused me to look up what Chuck Palahniuk has been up to since I started reading other authors and left Palahniuk in the dust and I found this gem.
It has been decades since I last picked up a Chuck Palahniuk book and therefore I forgot how raunchy he can be. There is blood. There is gore. And there is sex, but not in a sexy way. These are a few of the stories from Make Something Up and my thoughts.
Zombies
Zombies was about a horrible and destructive trend teenagers started picking up. What makes this story scary is that it is not much different from the Tide Pod trend not too long ago. Perhaps the motives are different and the outcome too, but it’s still the idea that trends, bad trends at that travel fast.
The basic idea of this story is that the trend with teenagers is to use a defibrillator on themselves to make them brain dead. That the stress is so great that it is better to live your life simple than to deal with the stresses of being a teenager.
As if this is not bad enough, Palahniuk has a way of stabbing you with a knife and then twisting it. The story ends in an airport and a kid with the pads stuck to his head and his finger over the button saying again and again “I will still love you. I just won’t know who you are.”
Cold Calling
Cold Calling was one of the lighter stories of Make Something Up. In this story, Palahniuk plays with race and generic racism. A kid works part time selling mops over the phone in Walla Walla, Washington. Everyone he talks to assumes he is in India and makes racial comments to him on every call, until he talks to Samantha who is also goes to a high school in Walla Walla, Washington, but is originally from Africa. He then reveals his is based in India.
They start to talk regularly and as the story unravels, he learns that not only do they go to school together, but she is not African at all. And he is not Indian. When he asks her out in person, she explains that she is involved with someone who doesn’t go to their school.
Why Aardvark Never Landed on the Moon
I found the story Why Aardvark Never Landed on the Moon, one of the more clever of the many stories in Make Something Up. It starts simple but cleaver and ends simple and clever.
The premise is that these boys decide to flunk fifth grade. They reason that if they take it a few times, yes they may humiliate themselves, but in a few years they will be smarter than everyone else and end up being astronauts or heart surgeons. They have this idea that this is the simple road to success. They put a lot of effort in failing and resort to sniffing glue to help them be dumber.
The story ends with a teacher getting fired due to having so many failures in the class and the boys being promoted to the next grade anyways. They then become drug addicts as the result of sniffing so much glue and never even make it to college.
Inclinations
After a teenaged girl is sent away by her parents for getting pregnant too many times. Each time she comes back she is rewarded for being reformed and is given a Porsche.
After seeing this, a teenaged boy gets the idea that if he convinces his parents he is gay, they will send him away and when he comes back reformed, they too will reward him with a huge sum of money. And the cherry on top is that he will be surrounded by women in an effort to make him straight again. Little did he know that the women would be dead.
The story continues with details of the dead women and how no one is actually reformed in this place. It’s all just a rouse to get parent to spend a lot of money and eventually go broke.
