REIMAGINE PALAHNIUK

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Misfits leap from one page to another, turning their little self-contained worlds upside down, inside out, sometimes even literally. This is a theme commonly tackled by Chuck Palahniuks’s books. However Palahniuk’s brand of transgressive fiction doesn’t just content itself with satire or irony, or the unspeakable horrors of forced normalcy. His characters don’t just worm themselves out of their own questionable sanity or their environment’s oppressive order. He also does it in such a way that somehow makes you feel as if he’s wringing your brain between his fingers, and letting all your brainjuice drip to the floor while you watch, mortified but captivated. The grotesque and horrific weave seamlessly into scenes of everyday life, that you get sucked into the surrealism before you even know it. That is, until it explodes in fantastical gore all over your face.

With concepts so depraved they’re tantalizing, how can one artist possibly leave the writer’s works alone? Paulo Correasure as hell couldn’t. Thus he embarked on Reimagine Palahniuk, a personal project where he rehashed various book covers as if they were low-brow gig posters.

Paulo’s visual style in essence is not very far from Palahniuk’s written imagery. His pen, ink, and digital works are often comprised of amorphous creatures with twisted pseudo-limbs floating in a myriad of intertwined ambiguous elements. His visions are dark and disturbing, despite exploding in bright, happy colors; perhaps no different from a lot of Palahniuk’s protagonists: rebels, outcasts hiding in plain sight. As such, applying the grotesquerie of his own art onto Palahniuk’s literary pieces wasn’t such a big leap.

Conceptually, Paulo’s philosophy doesn’t differ much from Palahniuk’s either. While the writer’s works may seem nihilistic, Paulo believes that they are actually reality, just allowed to run away and roll over-the-edge. Despite the absurdity and exaggeration, Paulo believes that they are still anchored on a deep foundation of truth, just presented with such rawness and honesty that it makes you cringe and want to look away. He says that they make you think, they make you question.

For Reimagine Palahniuk, Paulo based the main visuals on each book’s main character. Each cover-poster features a “human” element, either signified by a face or a head, as in “Invisible Monsters” and “Rant”, or parts of a face and head, as with “Choke” and “Survivor”, or, when the obvious becomes too boring, other human body parts, like shoulders in “Snuff”. He then throws in secondary characters or major plot details in the book morphing in and around of the main visual. For example, “Haunted” shows the main character with his head unravelling to reveal some of the gruesome plot details contained in the book. Meanwhile, “Fight Club” shows a corporate man beheaded with a man-like bird – with balls, at that – revealed to take over his other self. Though they may seem like random lines and haphazard details at first glance, all of the elements combined create a captivating, albeit curious, almost histrionic snippet of each book’s story. Paulo says each cover art is like a hybrid creature, a chimera of sorts, but that’s really a huge understatement.

Much like Palahniuk’s, Paulo Correa’s works make you think, make you question. They make you glance, look away in alarm perhaps, but they will always, always make you look twice. Then stare. Then start to wonder. Perhaps it’s not the bold colors or the skilfully executed lines that capture you in the end though. Perhaps it’s the misfit imagery leaping from the page, turning your little self-contained world upside down, inside out – but hopefully not literally. Let’s not get too carried away. – Julia Escaño

HAUNTED

Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach-churning stories. They’re told by people who have answered an ad for a writer’s retreat and unwittingly joined a “Survivor”-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you’ll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk.

CHOKE

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park.

FIGHT CLUB

In his debut novel, Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist. Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret boxing matches in the basement of bars. There two men fight "as long as they have to." A gloriously original work that exposes what is at the core of our modern world.

INVISIBLE MONSTERS

She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge that she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you'll ever want to look.

RANT: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey

Buster “Rant” Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.

SURVIVOR

Tender Branson—last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult—is dictating his life story into Flight 2039’s recorder. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah. Unpredictable and unforgettable, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak: a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world.

SNUFF

In the crowded greenroom of a porn-movie production, hundreds of men mill around in their boxers, waiting their turn with the legendary Cassie Wright. An aging adult film star, Cassie Wright intends to cap her career by breaking the world record for serial fornication by having sex with 600 men on camera—one of whom may want to kill her. Told from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and Sheila, the talent wrangler who must keep it all under control, Snuff is a dark, wild, and lethally funny novel that brings the presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction.