Palahniuk provides delightfully dark satire

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This article was published 01/11/2025 (329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new novel from Chuck Palahniuk? If you’re a fan, that’s pretty much all you need to hear.

If you’re unfamiliar with the author or recognize his name as the guy who wrote the book they made that movie Fight Club out of, then here’s what you need to know: Palahniuk is unique. There’s really no one like him writing today.

Palahniuk’s new book, Shock Induction (Simon & Schuster, 240 pages, $25), asks the question: why are high-school students, the best and the brightest, apparently killing themselves? The answer will shock you.

The novel is set in a near future in which the super-rich follow the lives of certain children, pretty much from the moment they’re born, to determine which will eventually be offered jobs — and, in essence, a life of servitude to their wealthy masters.

Yes, it’s satire (gloriously dark satire, in fact), but — and this surely is no accident — Palahniuk’s made-up near future feels an awfully lot like something we’re creating right now. Shifting stylistic and thematic gears without warning, challenging us to keep up with the author’s nimble imagination, Shock Induction is Palahniuk at his best.

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Gareth L. Powell’s Who Will You Save? (Titan Books, 432 pages, $25) is a new collection of short science fiction from two-time Britisch Science Fiction Association award winner.

The book’s 32 stories include both celebrated stories and lesser-known tales, and there’s even some new, never-before-seen material — if you’re a fan of his Embers of War trilogy, for example, you’ll be especially thrilled.

Powell’s writing blends epic-sized world-building with carefully-designed, abundantly human characters (and also some characters who aren’t human, or even technically living beings). Here you’ll visit places billions of years in the future, and places a lot closer to our own time; you’ll travel to far-flung locations, but you’ll also hang out here on dear old Earth (though it’s not the Earth you’ll recognize).

If you’re familiar with Powell’s novels — and, if you like science fiction, you really ought to be — you’ll love this book. If you’ve never read him before, now’s an excellent time to start.

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If you prefer your short fiction with more of a mystery flavour, check out On Fire and Under Water (Rock and a Hard Place Press, 248 pages, $20), edited by Curtis Ippolito. These 15 stories are very different from one another in terms of character and story and writing style. What unites them is a common theme: these are stories about people whose lives are affected, to one degree or another, by the reality of climate change.

No, this is not a treatise on the dangers of climate change. It’s not an eco-screed. But there is a story about a reporter who suspects a series of wildfires was not entirely random. There’s a story about corrupt government officials, and the farmer who will risk his life to stop them. And so on: legitimate crime stories told against a backdrop of an environment in upheaval.

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Hankering for more short fiction? Safe Enough (Mysterious Press, 256 pages, $24) by Lee Child, the creator of the terrifically popular Jack Reacher thrillers, gathers up 20 previously published stories, and here’s the really cool thing: none of them feature Reacher. They’re about killers and cops, FBI agents and assassins, private investigators and ordinary people (some of them good, some of them very bad), and they showcase Child’s gifts as a storyteller.

The stories are written in Child’s usual unadorned style, so they kind of sound familiar, but because he’s not restricted by the rules or structure of a Reacher story, he can do things he doesn’t ordinarily do — one story, The Bone-Headed League, is a riff on Sherlock Holmes, something Child could never have done in a Reacher story. Great stuff.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.