Chuck Palahniuk packs his books with so many factoids, catchphrases, parallels, patterns, and repetitive motifs that it's a wonder he actually manages to wedge in a story. The author of Fight Club and four other similarly staccato novels about disaffected outsiders (plus a quirky Portland travel guide), Palahniuk builds his narratives out of textual tics that are mostly a matter of taste: His fans adore him, and he drives just about everyone else nuts. But at least both sides admit his style is unique. The actual plot of his latest novel, Diary, involves Misty Marie Wilmot, an art student who drops everything to marry an eccentric rich boy from a fantastic island retreat–a place she'd never seen before their marriage, but had somehow been drawing in exacting detail since she was a child. Somewhere between chapters, her husband Peter attempts suicide and becomes comatose, everyone on the island suddenly becomes poor, Misty becomes a disintegrating alcoholic, and her mother-in-law and daughter begin plotting against her. Meanwhile, Peter's remodeling-business clients complain that entire rooms in their houses have gone missing. Ostensibly, Diary is Misty's "coma diary," written to tell Peter what he's missed, should he ever wake up. But the book intersperses her story with reams of facts about graphology, famous diseased artists, the odd ingredients used to make paint hues, old house-building and housewarming traditions, character-specific drinking-game rules, ersatz human weather reports ("partly suspicious with chances of betrayal"), lists of china patterns, scientific names for anatomical facial details, and obsessively repeated phrases. And while Misty begins by directly addressing her husband ("All you need to understand is you turned out to be one sorry sack of shit"), Diary vibrates rapidly and repeatedly between third and second person, sometimes addressing Misty instead, sometimes writing about her as a separate entity. It never reads like a diary, or anything a bitter, hard-drinking, trailer-bred art student might actually produce. But that's par for the course in a book where none of the characters are particularly realistic or even sympathetic, and high-concept edges out characterization at every turn. Still, Diary is one of Palahniuk's most compelling yarns since Fight Club. As is often the case in his books, the tics and twitches service a sort of prose-puzzle; read long enough, and they fade to a hypnotic, rhythmic drone, culminating in a series of minor thematic payoffs as the connections become clear. It can require some conscious effort to get that far into a Palahniuk book, but Diary's many compelling mysteries make it easy to wade into the manneristic mire, and the payoff, while heavily foreshadowed, is offbeat enough to be worth the trip.