Palahniuk: the king of transgressive novelists...

"The Missionary and the Brute" could rightly be categorized as being 'transgressive fiction'. It is an unrelenting look at the characters of a group of people interacting in a land that strips away all pretense to the bare-knuckle bones of raw intensity. There are few idealized characters, opting instead for rich portraits of people on their own journeys of suffering and turmoil. A few have devolved into beasts that contradict the strictures of a civilized culture that thus created them. In these ways it is transgressive and well in keeping with some of the other novels on our shelves thus labeled.

Labels, as always, are limiting and not completely accurate, but there are certain novelists whose work does indeed fall largely in this category. The king among these is Chuck Palahniuk. Bursting on the literary scene with the absolutely incendiary "Fight Club", Chuck's subsequent work has walked much the same treacherous terrain as that - his most famous novel. "Fight Club" is rightly deemed a classic. My gosh. It shines the harsh light of reality in the face of some aspects of our world in a unique and quite disturbing way. (Disturbing in a good way.) Boiled down to one sentence it can be summed up as 'we spend so much time psychically beating ourselves up that the act of beating ourselves up becomes the thing for which we beat ourselves up...'

Or something like that.