Fight Club

An unnamed narrator, an insomniac product recall specialist for a car company, attends support groups for illnesses he does not have purely to feel the release of other people's crying, a coping mechanism that stops working once another fraud, Marla Singer, starts attending the same groups and exposes his own act to himself. On a flight home he meets Tyler Durden, a soap maker and projectionist who splices frames of pornography into family films, and the two found a bare knuckle fight club that meets in a bar basement and grows into Project Mayhem, an increasingly organized campaign of pranks escalating into property destruction and, eventually, a plan to destroy the headquarters of several credit card companies to erase consumer debt records nationwide. The narrator gradually realizes, alongside the reader, that Tyler exists only inside his own fractured mind, a more confident and violent personality his insomnia and self loathing have generated and that has been running Project Mayhem's cells across the country under his own unconscious direction the entire time. Confronting Tyler on the roof of a building rigged with the group's explosives, the narrator shoots himself trying to kill Tyler off, and survives into an epilogue set in a psychiatric hospital, where members of Project Mayhem, working there as orderlies, tell him quietly that they are still waiting for his signal and that the planned demolitions are still coming.

It is short, brutal and darkly comic, told in short sentences and repeated slogans, deliberately provocative about masculinity, consumerism and violence; it reads very fast, and the narrator's mounting unreliability is the entire mechanism of the plot rather than a twist saved for the end.