I got this fair-condition softcover at a local Savers thrift shop. I've enjoyed some of Palahniuk's other work, and this one sounds intriguing: it's narrated by a guy who's the sole passenger in a jet plane that he hijacked and is planning to ride into the ground. But first he wants to tell his story, which he hopes will remain legible via the plane's black-box cockpit recorder...

His story begins with his youth in what sounds like a very weird cult indeed, one in which there are traditional "values" like "no sex outside of marriage" and fixed roles for everyone in the community. But it's also set up such that only the firstborn son of each family is allowed to marry; all the other sons, and every daughter who isn't chosen to marry, are effectively sold to families outside the cult as the perfect housekeeper/gardener/cleaning-person/slave, with intensive training in everything from stain removal to the right way to eat asparagus (!).

The story unfolds in a mix of bizarre humor and increasing emotional anguish, as our narrator juggles his employers' frantic phone-demands for etiquette advice with his regularly scheduled chores - plus his own little sideline, running a suicide hotline in which he frequentely winds up advising the callers to go ahead and do it. Yeah...

I enjoyed the black humor, but things began to get complicated when our hero meets the sister of one of his suicide-hotline victims - and she turns out to have psychic abilities (or claims to). He falls for her but is clueless as to how to proceed, so he winds up pulling something of a Cyrano de Bergerac when he recognizes her voice on his hotline and advises her to date "that weird guy from the cemetery". [Makes sense in context, sort of.]

Did I mention that, as one of the few survivors of a cult that committed suicide en masse, our hero has a regular caseworker assigned to try and keep him from following in their footsteps? That gets pretty messy too, not least when it seems he's the VERY last survivor and winds up a media sensation on the strength of that. But what if it isn't true?

Lots of riffs on popular culture, on the ways people try to cope with the things life throws at them, and on some really bizarre interpretations of love and how far one should go for it. Quirky, disturbing, funny and bleak - I rather liked it!

[There's a short TV Tropes page on the book.]

I plan to leave this book, bagged against the elements, on a stone wall overlooking the old school building; hope the finder enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

*** Released for the 2017 One Word Title release challenge. ***