'Diary' Can You feel It?

Suffering. Suffering. A daily overdose of it brings her talent back from the dead. She starts to paint like a schizophrenic overdosed on inspiration. With her eyes closed and Tabbi as her muse, she paints masterpieces. Misty has lost everything. Now, Tabbi and that dream of being an artist are the only things left for her -- as she paints, events run their course. An event that would make the island filthy rich for generations at a price of hundreds of lives. Misty Kleinman Wilmot. A queen of bloody slaves. A hostage who was destined to save the island from running out of money for the next four generations. A tool to use. The island that trapped itself within its own cycle. Once you are born, you're already doomed to fulfil your fate. You're doomed at being you.
Chuck Palahniuk delivers a nihilistic tale of an artist finding inspiration after the suicide of her husband. Along the way we learn that the idyllic island on which they live is involved in a conspiracy in which she is the key player. Even with this knowledge, the artist is powerless to resist the dark purposes of her neighbours.
How stupid would a painting of two unicorns kissing each other be in the midst of hellfire with angels screaming from wounds inflicted by demons? How stupid would that be if you call Justin Beiber's songs “art”? Okay, okay, I'll stop making fun of her.
Like all of Palahniuk's other works, “Diary” is vivid, disturbing, grotesque, and a bit supernatural. If his descriptions don't leave you feeling at least somewhat squeamish, then you must be strong. He is like a painter who makes the simplest object look hideously grotesque, who can look at a common scene and envision it in the twisted way only a serial killer might. Only, the serial killers in his novels don't kill for pleasure; they kill for reasons much more creative than that.
Palahniuk is nothing if not creative. “Diary” is written from the point of view of the protagonist, Misty, in the fashion of a long letter written to her comatose husband Peter. However, because she is writing to him directly, she refers to “you”, the reader, creating a number of identity overlaps. And none of this even begins to brush the surface of the story, which involves Misty's allegedly supernatural artistic abilities, her inexplicable attraction to Peter's shiny junk jewellery (which he pinned through his own scabby skin), and the creepy warnings she finds inside sealed-off rooms of buildings Peter remodelled before he tried to kill himself.
“Invisible Monsters” will always be my favourite Palahniuk novel, and “Fight Club” will always be the most famous. “Haunted” might very well be the most disturbing. But “Diary” pays homage to what Palahniuk does best: turn a common story and a common story form into an extraordinary and very unsettling tale.