 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to Top 5 Friday. Today we are talking about my 5 favorite, Top 5 favorite Chuck Pollinic books. This is going to be a very divisive subject. I know it is, especially because a certain book isn't on the list. I don't want to give any spoilers, but we're going to go ahead and jump right into it. Also, right off the bat, one of my favorite books is one of his most hated, oddly enough. I don't know why. I don't know why people don't like it as much as I do, but they're free to feel however they want about Dan. This is a story about a teenage girl who ends up going to hell, and hell is a landscape that is populated by giants that is as whole sea, I think it's like a river of semen. It's just a very bizarre, wacky book, and I loved every minute of it. One of the things that I liked about it, the currency in hell is candy bars. As a fat kid, I thought that was supremely cool, but I think what I like the most about the book is how funny it was. It was a return to form for Pollinic in that it made me laugh again, and a couple of few books before this one didn't. It's not that I didn't see the point of them, it's just that he took the experimentation side of things too far with things like Pygmy, and Snuff, and Tell All, and I wasn't a fan of those books. I also like the sequel to this one, Doomed. I didn't like it as much, but I did still like it. Doomed picks up right where this one leaves off, but it's funny because when people ask me to recommend them Chuck Pollinic books, I usually pick this one because I feel that it's a good entry place, and it's not so reliant on satire and parody of America or the world as we know it right now that it's not as accessible. A lot of people say Fight Club, I disagree with that. I think Damned is a good place to start and or one other one, but we'll get to that. Next up on the list is the absolutely notorious at number four, Haunted. And yes, this is one of the glow-in-the-dark covers. By the way, I collect Chuck Pollinic books. I own all of his stuff, but only in the anchor version of his paperbacks. I don't collect the hard covers. I do have three hard covers, but only because I found them at the thrift store. It's super cheap. I think one I found for a quarter of the other one I found for a dollar. But Haunted is an amazing collection of short fiction that is all tied together around a writer's retreat. So this group of authors get together and they, like I said, they go to a writer's retreat and they're all trying to tell each other stories. One of the most infamous stories in this and one of the things that Chuck Pollinic is most known for is supposedly, I think they were plants in the audience, but supposedly that when he read the short story Guts out loud during readings, people fainted, people got sick. I have been to some readings where that seems more gnarly and disturbing than what's in here. Any of the stories in here were told and nobody had a physical reaction. That's not to say that it couldn't have happened, but to have happened as much as Pollinic says it did, I kind of doubt it. But the story is Guts and I'm not going to spoil it for you. I'm not going to spoil any of these books, but it revolves a boy getting trapped in a swimming pool. That's it. But one of my favorite stories in here and I can never remember what it's called and I don't think they're split up by stories so it's not like I can go, yeah, I can't just go to that one. But it's a story about the chef, I think, who goes out into the snow. That's one of my favorite stories in the collection. But all the stories kind of tie together thematically and then there's an anchor story that holds the whole thing together and what's happening, I think what's happening to the people at the writer's retreat is the most interesting part of the story. The short stories are terrific, it wouldn't be at number four if they weren't. But the story within a story, within a story idea is I love that and that's why I love this book. So yeah, that's number four. Next up is, I have not seen the film version yet. I want to do a book versus movie of it. But at number three, we have Choke. For the longest time, this was my favorite one, my favorite Chuck Pollinate book for the longest time. And then another one came about, number two was published and number one, I finally got it round to reading, that's what bumped this out of the spot. But I had read, I think, Diary and Lullaby and Fight Club at this point. I think I might have even read Survivor, but this one came out of nowhere for me. I read this and as soon as I finished it, I picked it right, well I didn't even put it down. I started it right back over again so I could look for clues because the twist ending was so fucking amazing. It has one of the coolest, one of the best written reveals in all of literature, I think. The wording around, just the language, the verbiage, the way he tells the reveal at the end of the book just blows my mind and how well done it is. It's simple, yet it's very intricate, and it just comes out of nowhere. It's like, there's no clues whatsoever. There are, but it feels like there's no clues whatsoever. And if we're going to talk about Fight Club at some point in time, I think it's a better twist than Fight Club. If you've seen the movie, you read the book, I still feel the choke as far as twists are concerned is Chuck Pollinick's best twist. I also love how weird and bizarre the main character's job is. I mean, he's a, what is it, Civil War or let's say Revolutionary War, something like that, reenactor. So he has that. And then also on top of that, he chokes in restaurants, makes people feel bad for him, so they'll give him money. It's a very odd, very odd concept. And after the main reveal of the plot is wrapped up, and then it's like the final scene of the book, every time I think about it, I chuckle. Just like I did now. Every single time I think about it, I'm both disgusted and reduced to giggling or chuckling. And for a book to have given me that wide of a range of emotions, that's why it's number three. Okay. And number two is a book that either you're going to miss the point, either you're going to get the point, or you're going to miss it, and your enjoyment, your enjoyment of the book is completely going to be based on whether or not you catch it. And that's Rant, an oil, an oil, an oral biography, I think it's an oral biography of Buster Casey. So this book is pretty simple on the surface. It's just like a series of interviews. And it's also one of the only books written like this that I've ever liked. Epistolary, I think that's how you pronounce it. Sarah helped me. For the longest time I called it epistolary. I don't know why, but I believe it's epistolary. And the story is written in a set of interviews, just different people telling their stories of Buster Casey. And it's all about how he spread rabies throughout all these people by kissing them and whatnot. But that's not the story. That's not what's important. What is important are the, is the minutiae, the very small important details sprinkled throughout. And yes, just like most of Pollinix books, it does get to a point, it's so small that if you miss the twist, you're going to miss the whole point of the book. And I think that's one of the reasons why he writes such short books, so that if you miss the punchline, it's not going to be a completely wasted effort. Now recently, I would say his past 10, not 10. I wouldn't say 10. Probably his past seven books have not been all that great. Damned and doomed being the ones that, you know, the exceptions to that rule. It's probably actually the past five books. So Pygmy, Snuff, in fact, I could easily do a top five worst Chuck Pollinix books. You know, Pygmy, Tell All, Snuff, what is it? Beautiful You is one of the worst books I have ever read in my entire life, period. Those are horrible. I have not read Adjustment Day and I have not read The Fight Club 2. But anyways, I can't tell you what else I would put on the worst list because that would be a spoiler for number one. And we'll get there eventually. Another thing is that now that I've gone off on this tangent, I also want to bring up, Chuck Pollinix hasn't been paid in years also because his agent, I think it was his literary agent, screwed him out of all of his money. He just, he kept telling Chuck that, you know, the books aren't selling. You don't have any royalties. Come to find out. The guy was just pocketing all of Chuck's profits. It was a huge dick move. I'm sure you can just google it. I guess Chuck Pollinix getting ripped off for his royalties or whatever. And I felt terrible because I had given the guy so much drama and so much grief. They were honest reviews, but I was wondering what had happened to him. It's like, why, it just doesn't feel like his heart is in it anymore. And I'll be damned. It wasn't because he wasn't selling. Well, he thought he wasn't selling. And here this douchebag over here was just taking all of his money. It's a tragic thing. And I hope, I hope he gets back on his feet and I hope he understands that, you know, the fans are there for him. I'm going to continue reading him. I'm not giving up on him, especially after finding out. After Beautiful You, I almost did though, but I went ahead and bought Adjustment Day. So I got that one. I just haven't read it yet. Yeah, he's going on to my number one pick for the best Chuck Pollinix book is Dremel, please. It was on my, it was on my top 20 list. So if you saw that, you know what it is. It's Invisible Monsters. Yeah, which is a rad cover because you have the princess or you have the granny. I love optical illusions, man. So you got granny and you got princess. That's really cool. That's funny. I just realized that his name is not on the cover. So anyways, but this one, he says, I think, in the afterward or the forward, I can't remember which one, but he brings up, in fact, if there even is, maybe I've read an article about it that said, yeah, it looks like maybe it was in a remix because there's another version of the book called Invisible Monsters remix that I have not read yet. When I do my reread of all of Pollinix books, I will go back. I will actually read the remix version of this one. But what I found fascinating about this, I think I read an article in which he said that he was going for, he writes all of his books with a certain style in mind. It was like, pig me, we all know what happened. If you read pig me, we all know what kind of style he was going for there. But with Invisible Monsters, he was trying to recreate the style of like a cosmopolitan or an L or a fashion magazine. He was trying to recreate that style of writing for a novel. And this is one of his longer books. It's 300 pages. I know that sounds weird, but most of his books are anywhere from 200 to 220, 250, something like that. This is one of his longer books. Haunted is, I think, 400 pages, 400 some odd pages, but only because it's basically a short story collection. With this one, I will, there's, I know there's a twist. I just don't remember the twist. What sticks out the most for me is how well it was written. Not that Chuck's a bad writer at any point in time. Even Pig Me was consistent throughout with what he was trying to do, but how well he accomplished what he set out to do. Because after I was done with this, I went out and I checked out the, I bought, I think it was a copy of a cosmopolitan, a copy of L, a copy of a couple other ones. All of the fashion magazines, Vogue, I went grab that. Maybe it's not just fashion magazines. I don't know what exactly they're called, but those types of magazines. And I read them and I was shocked at how close that style was to reading one of those articles. But there is a scene at the end of this book. I don't know if it's really a twist, but there is a scene at the end of this book that involves, the only thing I'm going to tell you is the color blue. So if you read this book and you come across the ending and you see all this blue, then you know what I'm talking about. That scene has really stuck in my memory to the point of, well, I just haven't been able to get rid of it. It's been stuck in my head ever since I read it the first time. I remember it so, so vividly. Another thing is the main character in here, if you've read my, I don't want to give any spoilers, but I guess this kind of is for my work. If you haven't read my book, Fog Warning, and you plan to, then try and either scrub ahead. This is the end of the video, so I guess you can just click away. Bye. So spoilers for my book, Fog Warning, kind of. I got the idea for Fog Warning, what happens in the middle of that book. I got the idea from that, from this one because of the main character, the way the main character looks. So I got that idea from, I got the idea from my book from here. I wanted to do something similar. I wanted to do something so traumatic to a character that you would think, how in the hell did they survive that? And that's what I wanted to do. So that's a little bit of, you know, inside information for you people who actually fans of my work and not just fans of the channel. Anywho, so that's my top five Chuck Pollinic books. And yeah, Fight Club's not here. I don't like Fight Club. In fact, if I were going to do top five worst Chuck Pollinic books, it would probably be number five. And then I would work my way up to number one. Number one would probably be, would probably be Beautiful You. I mean, if we're honest, that book was just utterly atrocious. And yes, I know what he was trying to do. He was trying to riff off, not rip off, but riff on the rise of crap like Fifty Shades of Gret, sorry. If you like those books, I think they're crap. And Twilight and that kind of thing. The erotic books that were coming up, they're much better erotic books than Fifty Shades of Gret. And not Twilight, but I always think Twilight when I think of Fifty Shades of Gret because it was originally Fifty Shades. It was originally Twilight fan fiction. So, but anyways, he was trying to go after that trend is what he was writing a book for. He follows trends in that he likes to, he satire and parody of those trends. It's just, it didn't work. It came off as instead of coming off as satirical or smart or a parody or mockery, it just came off as stupid and silly. None of the, none of the cleverness was there. And then the ending came about and I just threw up my hands and I almost threw the book. But yeah, so that's my top five. Please leave your top five down there below. If you disagree with me, please be nice about it. Don't be a jerk. Be respectful. You can tell me that you hate all of these books. That's fine. I don't mind just, you know, keep your opinions about me out of it and just talk about the books. But if you like these books, let me know why you like them. Let's have a discussion down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been Ian, you have been you. This has been another Top Five Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye. Hey, I have the next four weeks of Top Five Friday planned. But if you would like to, on this video down there, since you hung out to the end, if you want to suggest something that I, well, you can just suggest anything if I've done it. I'll just let you know I've done it and give you a link to it. But if you would like to suggest an idea for Top Five Friday, please leave your suggestions down there and I will pin that, well, I will, I will keep this video in mind and I will come back here and just use this video as a resource to get all of your guys' suggestions. So let's use this video for a suggestion pit and drop them all down there in the comments below. But yeah, that's everything for this video. Talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.