Shock Induction

by Chuck Palahniuk

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a dark, satirical parable about a string of mysterious high school disappearances, the seedy underbellies of billionaires, and the tough choices we make in the face of an uncertain future.

In Shock Induction, the best and brightest students at a seemingly reputable high school are disappearing. Every day it seems another overachiever is lost to an apparent suicide. But something far more sinister is lurking beneath the surface.

These kids have been under surveillance since birth, monitored and measured by an online service called “Greener Pastures.” It’s here, in Greener Pastures, that billionaires observe and recruit the next generation of talent. The highest test scores, the best grades, and the most niche extracurriculars just might land these teenagers an enticing offer at auction. A couple billion dollars in exchange for the remainder of your life and intellectual labor sounds like a pretty fair deal—doesn’t it?

In a high school only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine, students must choose between the risk of following their dreams or the security of money and a lifetime of servitude to the world’s wealthiest and most elite—but how much of a choice do they truly have?

Release date: October 8, 2024

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 240

Sample

Chapter 1

1
Want to control other people? One method of induction depends on exhausting the subject’s mind. Ply the subject with so many details they lose the ability to focus on any single one.

Tire them until their eyes glaze over.

If you must, picture a person. A person not so young they bank on every haircut being a fresh start. A person old enough to recall when the top of all windshields was colored blue. Can you picture that? Every day, a blue sky. Such optimism.

Let’s start with that much.

Now give yourself a big hug. You’re doing great!

Adjusting for variables in household income in recent recorded history circa 2032, the United States Senate Subcommittee on Education sat down with industry leaders from strategy-based commercial publishing for the stated purpose of identifying and ameliorating the environmental factors perpetuating the persistent and substantial gap of no less than two standard deviations in educational outcomes evident between grouped gender and ethnic cohorts specific to urban-sensitive populations.

Factoring in raw data, not limited to corollary subsets, sourced from sixteen distinct cohorts and adjusted, plus or minus two percent, for overall physical and emotional well-being as well as socioeconomic-status inequities and the implementable strictures of realistic policy response, given how the variable figure is an artifact of both performative and empirical significance at least as measurable quantifiable skills attainment might diverge, those present engaged with the quandary as to reasons academic learners had so recently failed to engage with long-form prose.

Allowing for the first and last quintile, the resultant cognitive mean skills gap, provable by intersectional juxtaposition and by forgoing traits non-applicable to increased resource investment in pre-K through post-secondary settings.

In abstract they asked: Why the heck isn’t anyone reading Moby-Dick?

Are you tired yet?

Another method to induce a hypnotic trance is fractionation.

You call the subject’s attention in different directions. Listen to the sounds around you. Listen. Focus on the smooth feel of the paper under your fingertips, focus on the brush and peel as you turn the next page.

Picture a girl. Picture Samantha Deel. If you must, picture Samantha’s uncle. Samantha Deel has an uncle who served the better part of a seven-year sentence in prison. This uncle registers as a sex offender.

Although he’s wheelchair bound, Sam’s uncle still reports to his parole officer every week, all because he one time “forgot” a safe word during sex. Most of his adult life, Sam’s uncle spends every waking moment grumbling to himself, “Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado.”

Picture Samantha’s mother, a woman who once complained about the court-ordered Intoxalock device on her car. “I don’t have to drink,” Sam’s mom said. “Even if I’ve just been eating a Cinnabon or huffing gasoline, it can still blow a false positive.”

Picture Samantha’s father, who once carried his Weatherby SA-08 twenty-gauge into the woods. Between racoon season and upland quail, he walked out to shoot mistletoe from the crown of a white oak. A big dark mass of mistletoe, if you can picture it, a month’s rent hiding high up among the oak branches. Samantha’s father shouldered the rifle and squinted down the barrel at the dark shape in the leaves. He braced with one foot back and pulled the trigger, Sam’s father did, and that great clump of mistletoe came crashing down. Except it wasn’t mistletoe.

A body fell at his feet, Mr. Deel had killed a man. Except the man was already dead, with a noose of rope knotted around his neck, the skin as thin as a coat of paint on the dead man’s bones. A suicide, her father had shot down.

Except the dead man spoke. He lay at the feet of Samantha’s dad, busted from the falling impact, from battering so many sturdy oak branches, this man, the noose still cinched around his neck and the rope blasted in half.

Listen, and you can hear the half-dead man peppered with buckshot, bleeding from the holes in his clothes but still muttering to himself, “Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado. Avocado…”

Feel the heft of the book in your hands.

That’s fractionation induction.

The anecdote also demonstrates cognitive reframing.

Spin = Cognitive Reframing.

Please think of this first part as the opposite of a wake-up call.

Wonderful. You’re doing just great. You’re doing great.

Big hug.

If you’ve read this far you’ve already read too far. Go wash your hands.

The Senate findings committee had fingered gaming and online pornography as the primary driving factors for the outcome of functional illiteracy.

“Gaming and movies are nothing but light and sound,” the Senate stated. They asked, “What do we have to throw at them?”

An editor from big publishing hovered over the microphone. “Senator, in 2032 alone, more than twelve hundred people died from handling dollar bills laced with fentanyl.” For effect, here the editor hesitated. “I submit for your approval a glorious new future for books and the readers who love them. May I present the ERE Program.”

Excerpted with full permission from Regular Ward Care for Comatose ERE Patients

In cases of acute ERE poisoning, withhold tracheal intubation. At all times, pay close attention to respiration. Always note when bronchial encumbrance in the comatose patient requires the use of airway clearance techniques (ACTs). Be aware of end-stage wet respirations, also known as the “death rattle”…

In that closed-door secret subcommittee meeting in the Department of Education, the editor finally asked, “Can you see where this is headed?”