Beautiful You
“Sex is on the mind of author Chuck Palahniuk, and it is taken to extremes and tweaked to outrageous lengths in his latest novel, Beautiful You. 50 Shades of Grey this isn’t. In fact, the book is almost a middle finger to ‘mommy porn’ and the popularity of modern erotica—while also being a smart, satirical take on misogyny, fame, the fashion industry, self-help, and science… Palahniuk’s graphic storytelling is bound to ruffle puritanical feathers—which is probably part of his point—but it’s essential to the societal takedown. Nothing is sacred and everything gets torched, from pop culture to celebrity.”
USA Today
From the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged contemporary male psyche, now comes this novel about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of female pleasure.
Penny Harrigan is a low-level associate in a big Manhattan law firm who has an apartment in Queens and no love life at all. So it comes as a great shock when she finds herself invited to dinner by one C. Linus Maxwell, aka “Climax-Well,” a software megabillionaire and lover of the most gorgeous and accomplished women on earth. After taking her to dinner at Manhattan’s most exclusive restaurant, he whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed-of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. What’s not to like?
This: Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys to be marketed in a nationwide chain of boutiques called Beautiful You. So potent and effective are these devices that women by the millions line up outside the stores on opening day and then lock themselves in their rooms with them and stop coming out. Except for batteries. Maxwell’s plan for erotically enabled world domination must be stopped. But how?
Praise