Pygmy

Palahniuk’s characteristic black humor pushed to extremes
You know an author means business when he opens his book with an epigraph by Adolf Hitler. "He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future," is Chuck Palahniuk's Hitler quote of choice, and it hints darkly at the cultural satire to come.

Pygmy is a 13 year-old kid from an unnamed totalitarian state sent to live with a suburban Midwestern family for six months, posing as an exchange student. His hidden aim? Terrorism, of course. Along with a group of incognito peers (also posing as foreign exchange students) Pygmy plans to unleash "Operation Havoc," an act of shocking mass destruction.

Written in "dispatches" narrated by the title character, Palahniuk opts for the risky maneuver of writing in his character's imaginary broken English. Paul Michael Garcia's inventive delivery smoothes the translation by bringing Pygmy's voice to life, and the charging plotline guarantees that the book's momentum isn't slowed by the narrator's shaky grasp of grammar. If Fight Club was Palahniuk's black humor at its finest, Pygmy contains that same sensibility, pushed to its logical extreme. Pygmy is a fascinating take on a xenophobic nation.