The Novel From Fight Club Author That Needs The Big-Screen Treatment

Chuck Palahnuik’s Survivor is a harrowing yet hilarious tale about the lone surviving member of the Creedish Church, a death cult that ultimately commits mass suicide not unlike the real-life Heaven’s Gate religious group that acted similarly in 1997. The story’s protagonist, Tender Branson, along with a few others move on with their lives, working menial jobs, waiting for the right moment to delete themselves from existence. Working as a house keeper for the exceedingly wealthy while living on government assistance himself, Tender Branson receives an influx of phone calls when his personal phone number is accidentally listed in the newspaper as the primary point of contact for a crisis hotline.

Playing god with the incoming calls, he gets a sick thrill out of telling people to end their lives before callously hanging up and going about his day.

If you already hate everything that Tender Branson stands for in Chuck Palahnuik’s Survivor, things get much, much worse as the story progresses. As other surviving members of the Creedish Church decide to catch up with their fallen brethren in the afterlife, Tender and his estranged fraternal twin brother, Adam, become the only remaining survivors of the death cult, and Adam is desperately trying to eliminate Tender before taking his own life. While trying to murder Tender, Adam inadvertently poisons the caseworker assigned to him with cleaning chemicals instead.

As Tender and Adam find themselves constantly at odds with one another in Chuck Palahnuik’s Survivor, Tender gets scooped up by an unnamed publicity agent who wants to give him a platform so he can speak about his upbringing and the horrors of his religious cult, of which he is, to their knowledge at least, the only remaining member.

Riffing on the idea of sensationalist media manipulation and religious exploitation, Chuck Palahnuik takes Survivor into increasingly absurd territory as Tender Branson gets an extensive makeover to make him fit for television appearances. Tender preaches his good word to the masses like one of those late-night televangelists who tells you they have all the answers at your most vulnerable moments. Waiting to reach peak popularity before un-aliving himself in the most public way possible (while encouraging everybody watching to do the same), Tender bides his time as he performs various “miracles” to stay in the public’s good graces.

The “miracles” are communicated to him by a mysterious woman with psychic powers named Fertility Hollis, whom he meets at the cemetery after he advises her brother to end his life during one of his many phone calls.

While all of the above plot points in Survivor sound controversial enough, they are not the reasons that the Chuck Palahnuik novel never got an appropriate adaptation. While making light of the plight that real-life religious cult members were actually subjected to in the ’90s is reason enough to never turn this novel into a film, the real reason the movie never got fully realized is the plane hijacking plot introduced at the beginning (or ending, depending on how you interpret it) of the book.

Starting at Chapter 47, and on page 289, Survivor’s narrative boasts a full-blown Quentin Tarantino kind of framework, as it starts at the end and folds in the exposition throughout its preceding chapters as Tender Branson plans to crash-land his plane into the Australian Outback. While 20th Century Fox optioned the novel for a film adaptation after Fight Club’s success, the September 11, 2001 attacks squashed the idea and shelved the project before it ever it made it to production.

While it was probably a good idea to pump the breaks on Chuck Palahnuik’s problematic premise, it’s worth nothing that although Survivor’s entire plot hinges on the hi-jacking, it’s the moments leading up to it through Tender Branson’s recounting of events that are worth exploring. The novel in its entirety makes an honest attempt to get inside the head of somebody who has been brainwashed and manipulated from an early age, and how they cope with the fallout of the failed institution they were subjected to as they arrive at adulthood. I also feel the urge to point out that Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails offered to score the film while its screenplay was still being written.

While it’s unfortunate that we’ll probably never get a Survivor movie, Chuck Palahnuik’s followup to Fight Club is worth a read because it takes so many dark turns, each one more perverse than the next. But as disturbing as the story may be, its intense take on humanity’s many flaws at the very least deserves a space on your bookshelf.