I have yet to read much of his work, because though I thought Fight Club (the movie) was groundbreaking and original and he has such a great reputation and traffics in the type of content I’d normally find fascinating, I read his book “Haunted” and was extremely put off. Note that I did not say offeneded or bothered, but put off. I have no problem with the gruesomeness and vileness of some of the imagery, that’s right up my alley, but I felt as though his characters who were performing some very unsalient acts on themselves and each other, simply lacked any motivation (stated or otherwise) for behaving in the manner in which they did. To me it was like a complete exercise in shock value for it’s own sake…OK, I can see how a particular occurrence could be very powerful in the proper context, but it seemed to me that he completely left context out of this book. So I’ve been a bit leery of picking up any of his other novels as this was by far one of the least believable books I’ve ever read and it simply seemed to be massive potential horribly wasted. If one could take his disturbing imagery and actually place it within a contextual framework where one could even begin to create one’s own supposed motivations for said behaviors, it could have been a hell of a read, but instead everything I read I thought, “OK, by WHY?” Why would anyone do that? What is the catalyst? What is the motivation? This makes zero sense. There was no narrative, just a bunch of people outdoing each other with nothing to gain by it. I hope his other books are better, I think I’ll go with kevbo’s recommendations.