Choke by Chuck Palahniuk (Paperback, 2003)

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

In his new novel, Choke, Palahniuk gives readers a vision of life and love and sex and mortality that is both chillingly brilliant and teeth-rattlingly funny

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's controversial and blazingly original debut novel, introduced a fresh and even renegade talent to American fiction, one who has retooled the classic black humour of Terry Southern and Vonnegut for the lunacy of the millennial age.

Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care- pretend to be choking and the person who 'saves' you will feel responsible for the rest of their life. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. 

Between fake choking gigs, Victor works at Colonial Dunsboro with a motley group of losers and stoners trapped in 1734, cruises sex addiction groups for action and visits his mother, whose anarchic streak made his childhood a mad whirl and whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his, possibly divine, parentage.