For Fans of Chuck Palahniuk

Most readers remember Fight Club as either a macho thriller or a slick David Fincher film. The novel is neither. Palahniuk is writing in the tradition of the grotesque, and Tyler Durden is less a character than a fever dream the narrator conjures to cope with a world designed to produce exactly his kind of dissociation. The comedy is relentless and deliberate. The horror is structural: by the time the reader understands what is actually happening, they have already been rooting for something they should be afraid of.

Palahniuk wrapped Haunted's stories in a framing device where writers locked in a mansion for a retreat systematically destroy themselves for the chance of becoming famous victims. It is a satire of creative ambition so aggressive it becomes its own kind of horror. The story Guts caused people to faint at readings. It is not the most disturbing piece in the collection. That tells you everything about what Palahniuk was doing.

Sam Esmail understood something that most Fight Club imitators miss: the real subject is not violence or rebellion, it is the specific alienation of someone who can see exactly how the system works and is made sick by that knowledge. Mr. Robot builds its own unreliable narrator architecture with the same care Palahniuk uses in prose, and it earns every twist by following its character's psychology rather than reaching for shock.

Palahniuk's protagonists are almost always men in spectacular states of collapse who narrate their own disasters with forensic detachment. Disco Elysium's Harry Du Bois operates on the same principle: a detective so destroyed he cannot remember who he was, reconstructing an identity from a crime scene and a set of competing internal voices. The game is also very funny about very dark things, which is about as close as games have come to the Palahniuk register.