PALAHNIUK, Chuck. Survivor. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 289 pp., paginated in reverse order. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special limitation page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962) grew up in Burbank, Washington, worked for years as a truck mechanic and a journalist, and published Fight Club in 1996 after it had been rejected by several publishers on the grounds that no one would buy a novel so relentlessly dark. Its subsequent cult success — accelerated by David Fincher's 1999 film adaptation — made Palahniuk one of the most widely read American novelists of his generation, and established the mode in which he has worked ever since: first-person confessional narration, deadpan black comedy, formal experimentation, and a consistent fascination with the mechanisms by which contemporary consumer culture destroys the selves it claims to liberate. Survivor, published the same year as the Fight Club film, was his second novel.

Tender Branson is, as the novel opens, the last known surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult, a religious sect whose adult members have obeyed a divine instruction to kill themselves, leaving only Tender alive. He is dictating his life story into the black box recorder of a Boeing 747 that he has hijacked and that is, he knows, about to crash. The novel is his confession — of his childhood within the cult, his sale into domestic servitude, his accidental discovery that the outside world will pay attention to a man who has suffered impressively, his transformation at the hands of agents and publicists into a celebrity "survivor," his relationship with a woman named Fertility Hollis who can predict the future, and the chain of events that has brought him to an empty plane heading for the Australian desert.

The formal device that gives the novel its most immediately striking quality is its pagination: the pages are numbered in reverse, from 289 down to 1, so that each chapter brings the reader closer to the crash and the manuscript shorter as the plane descends. It is Palahniuk at his most structurally deliberate, using the mechanics of the book as an analogue for the content of the narrative — the sense that everything is counting down, that time is running out, that what we are reading is already in the past by the time we read it.

Survivor is a savage satire of celebrity culture, of the American appetite for redemption narratives, and of the way in which authenticity — even the authenticity of genuine suffering — is immediately colonised and commodified by the media machinery that claims to honour it. It is also, beneath the satire, a genuinely melancholy novel about a man who has never been allowed to be a person.

Very good. Loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting to edge gilt. Contents otherwise fine.

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Catalogue Number: HH000519