Fight Club sat in the back of my mind for a while.  I was tempted to read it.  After watching the infamous 1999 movie, I just had to read the original.  Where it started with just one author.  I’ll admit, I was a bit nervous to read such a lesser-known novel next to the cult classic movie. As a movie lover and a book lover,  It is one of my favorite things to read a book after watching a movie that I fall in love with just to see if that famous saying, “the book is always better than the movie” is necessarily true.  That saying goes true for this one.  The book is definitely better.  

The novel follows a man, or perhaps an unknown narrator who is an insomniac, 9-5 working man that lives the so-called American dream.  Having a desk job, and a fully furnished apartment, but his life feels as if it is anything less than a dream.  As his world is slowly falling apart he visits disease support groups where everyone around him is slowly dying just like him.  After his apartment is blown to pieces he meets a man in an effort of making himself feel whole again. Tyler Durden. The two men in efforts of making other men feel whole again become something more than a club for men addicted to adrenaline, and more than an escape.  It becomes a nightmare and expands to something larger than anyone could have ever imagined. 

  This book is a major punch in the face for any reader.  It is full of unique action and page-turning plot points that make the book so much more than just a club in a basement. The book was honestly hard for me to put down.  I felt the panic and fear that the narrator felt which made the book so much more intriguing just because you felt you were there. It was very adrenaline filled and forced your heart rate to speed up just like characters had happened to them. It had some of the best plot setups I have ever honestly read and it felt very real.

The visualization of the setting was a fantastic way to show emotion and movement with the characters. I felt I was in just about every setting that was put in the book.  Between the basement and Tyler's house, I was there with them.  I could visualize just about every scene between the church, his work, and everything which is honestly very hard for an author to do in my eyes when there are so many settings and so much going on at once, so it was a great feeling to be able to read this novel and be able to visualize where everyone was.  I also really enjoyed the consistency with the setting because it always followed that gloomy visualization that started on page one and was consistent throughout all the novels.

I felt a brilliant sense of emotion towards the main three characters.  The Narrator, Tyler Durden, and Marla Singer.  They all were so individually written so well and were such unique characters that it really brought an interest within the novel for me to keep reading.  They all followed a similar effect due to their gloomy surroundings, but they were all individual humans that had such a unique portrayal of their emotions.  

The dialogue was a huge part of this novel and honestly makes or breaks a book for me.  It was very distinct between the characters and was easy to identify who was talking because everyone's speaking mannerism was different.  Even though there were a lot of vulgar language, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, I really felt that it was necessary with some of the characters and the word choices to identify whose' who was so important to have and was put together so well.

Overall, I would say the novel, Fight Club is a solid 8/10 with its extreme amount of details within its plot, setting, dialogue and characters.  It was such a unique read as I am someone who likes realistic fiction, it was really cool to go out and think outside of the box just like many of the characters did.  It was very consistent with its characters and settings which was really important as the narrator was all over the place due to his way of thinking.  The only thing I would critique about this book is the pace.  It was oddly placed by having characters talk about something for a long period of time but never bringing it back up or ever having major importance, but this occurrence was rare.  So it is definitely a book I would recommend.