On Saturday I started reading Diary. The novel is eerie and reminds me heavily of Rosemary’s Baby (minus the Satanism).
Diary tells the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, an art school dropout who is apparently the world’s greatest painter if she’d just try. As a young girl Misty would paint pictures of an island she had never seen before. In art school she met and fell in love with one of the sons of that particular island. Years later, her now husband has gone off of his rocker and defaced many a rental-house room with ominous warnings about his wife, death, and being manipulated.
I won’t give away any more details about the story, but it is quite compelling. The pacing of the book seemed a little slower than some of Palahniuk’s previous works (I thought Invisible Monsters felt twice as busy as this novel), but that was largely due to its point of view. You see, the entire book is loosely written as a diary from Misty’s point of view–there’s nary a page that isn’t revolving around her or her memories of the past.
The entire work holds up quite well (though there was a particular spot near the end that felt like a logical jump with little explanation). One complaint I had with the work was that it seemed a bit predictable at points (but that may have been the point given the whole book…)
Anyway, I liked it well enough and I was happy to see it wasn’t as outrageous as Invisible Monsters or Choke which, though entertaining, seemed often to be darkly weird for darkly weird’s sake.
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