Can’t fall asleep? Drink a glass of warm milk. Try not to lose your grip on life. Maybe listen to some calming music. Please don’t attend therapy groups for some disease you don’t even have. Counting sheep might work. By no means should you ever create some elite club with a soap salesman…but, if you do, remember the first rule—never, and I mean never, talk about it!

FIGHT CLUB revolves around our unnamed insomniac narrator, who meets Tyler Durden, a soap salesman with an idea, a crazy outlook on life and fighting. Their rendezvous starts out as a few rounds in the back of sleazy bars, but quickly spirals out of control and is transformed into a nationwide phenomena…and so Fight Club is born. Every night, across the country, groups of people gather to fight. It seems the smell of blood alters them from humans to animals, and the impulse society has forced them to contain is finally released. Luckily, readers will also be drunk with the smell of blood—so much so, by the end of the novel, they won’t even be able to tell the difference between Tyler and the narrator…which, this time, is a good thing.

Don’t let the barbarian tone fool you, the plot eventually becomes extremely complex; and yet, Palahnuik handles it with care, catches us with a left hook of a novel, and proves to be a humorously dark author.