From the sex workers making easy money out of him to… well, I’m not going to tell you. Because he’s so hellbent on figuring that one mystery, he is ruthlessly used by other characters. It makes him feel like he’s in control, but he’s not. Foster’s singe-minded obsession about finding what happened to his daughter makes life worth living for him. The illusion of control is an important theme in The Invention of Sound. Foster is trying hard to regain a semblance of control over his life by resolving Lucinda’s disappearance, but he is surrounding all control over the present in the process. His segments are a spectacle of self-destruction. One thing that made it work is how completely out of his mind with grief protagonist Gates Foster is. You’ve already guessed it, The Invention of Sound isn’t ONLY a novel about sound. What does Mitzi have to do with it? Well, everything and nothing. That includes paying sex workers to impersonate an adult Lucinda. He has been literally searching for Lucinda all these years, but also symbolically looking for her in every young woman. The Invention of Sounds has two protagonists: jaded and self-destructive sound engineer Mitzi Ives and Gates Foster, a man who has been devoured alive by the disappearance of his daughter for seventeen years. In his latest novel The Invention of Sound, Palahniuk tackles… uh, sound (and other stuff) and it turns out there’s a lot to say about it. No topic is ever hot enough to keep him quiet.

An original thinker and a top shelf provocateur. Carried throughout his career (for better or worse) by the success of his immense debut novel Fight Club, he gained a cult following in popular culture for being a subversive figure. Chuck Palahniuk is the last of a dying breed of entertainers.

Chuck palahniuk books in order