Here, the author of Fight Club and Survivor gives us a personal snapshot of his home town of Portland in the US that is one-part history to two-parts anecdotal musings and walk-on cameos.
It does not extol the virtues of the Oregonian town as a tourist destination; rather, this is a guided tour around the red-light district, palm in sweaty palm with the drag queens and prostitutes who know all the nasty tales; it is a saunter around decrepit museums housing a quintessential collection of vacuum cleaners and the world's largest hairball. It is a dimly lit blunder under the city's underground tunnels, where you can wallow, knee-deep in waste, with only the ghosts and your stuttering flashlight for company. It is a day spent rioting with 60 Santa Clauses in gin-fuelled folly.
The stories themselves are entertaining enough, but there is a lot of filler in the cracks beneath the wallpaper. Palahniuk describes his first apartment, flush with the expensive food he and his roommates had stolen from the restaurants they worked in, and how he tossed his newly found jar of removed tonsils from the balcony and wished to be a writer. These are the kind of experiences that find themselves into his books, and it is easy to link the anarchic wit that permeates his previous six novels with Portland and his tribulations therein.
The problem is there isn't enough to really make a complete book, and he unwittingly fills too many pages with exactly the kind of stuffing one expects in second-rate tourist books: an eight-page restaurant guide has six recipes and not nearly enough narrative; while Francis Gabe's self-cleaning house is fascinating, the pages on steam trains are not exactly riveting, and the story of how the baseball park solved its rat problem is even less so. (They used cats, in case you were wondering. Not exactly revelatory, is it?)
This is an often amusing, if occasionally pointless, jumble of surreal urban myths staged within a fading beauty pageant of the mundane.
Laurence Mackin is a freelance journalist and critic
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon by Chuck Palahniuk Vintage, 175pp. £6.99