Book Review: Diary [Chuck Palahniuk]

RATING: Haunting. Couldn't put it down!

Misty Marie Kleinmann, who’s lived all her life in a trailer park, likes beautiful pictures and shiny things. She attends art school, where she meets Peter Wilmot, the son of a wealthy family in wealthy Waytansea Island. The promising young artist gets married to her beloved, and she is whisked off to a fairytale ending in Waytansea Island.

Or at least, that’s what she thought.

Twelve years after happily ever after, Misty Wilmot is working as a waitress in the island’s only hotel. The Wilmots are broke, her husband is in a coma, she barely knows her teenage daughter, and her mother-in-law’s a pain in the ass. And if that wasn’t enough, threats of lawsuits are posed to leap from every corner of the tourist-ridden island.

Before the accident that turned him into a vegetable, Peter (a contractor for vacation houses) has taken to redecorating the houses without their owners’ permissions: he has built secret rooms and written cryptic (and rather vulgar, hehe) messages all over the walls.

A confused Misty starts on a mission to find out the truth about her husband’s actions (like if he really did stick people’s toothbrushes up his ass, for example :P). She starts to find other cryptic messages hidden all over the island, written by two women from previous centuries.

And in the midst of it all, Misty (who hasn’t picked up a paintbrush since art school) starts to paint again. Rather obsessively, too, as if being driven by some unknown force.

When she finally pieces everything together, she finds herself in the middle of a secret that puts her family and the entire island in danger.

“Diary” is a hauntingly strange book. The plot is odd, the events unfold in a series of inconsecutive flashbacks, and the story told in second-person where you, the reader, are Peter.

I think "Diary" deserves a five for three reasons: 1) The mystery got me so hooked, I wasn’t able to put the book down. (I finished this one in one sitting); 2) A "whoa" ending that has a way of etching itself into your mind; 3) It's a strange and totally unbelievable story that's packed up so neat and pretty in the end that it’s convincing enough to make you think “What if it’s real?” with series of chills running down your spine.