Make Something Up (2015)

Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread is a collection of short stories published on May 26, 2015, and written by Chuck Palahniuk.

Make Something Up ranked No. 8 on the ALA's list of the Top Ten Challenged Books of 2016, due to profanity, sexual explicitness, and being "disgusting and all around offensive."

Stories

"Knock Knock" (Dec 2010 of Playboy) - The narrator recounts their relationship with their father, who taught them many off-color jokes as a child that they repeated without knowing what they meant. Their father now suffers from terminal prostate cancer. The narrator tries to make him laugh before he dies, but no matter how many of the jokes they tell, he never laughs. They realize, eventually, that they were the butt of the joke all along.

"Eleanor" - Written with many malapropisms. Randy hates trees and moves from Oregon to California with his pit bull called Eleanor. He marries a realtor called Gazelle. On Christmas Eleanor chews a nativity figure of Baby Jesus and Gazelle then buys a large Christmas tree.

"How Monkey Got Married, Bought a House and Found Happiness in Orlando" - Akin to an Aesop folktale. Monkey works successfully in sales in Llewelyn Food Marketers Inc. and is determined to advance her career in Orlando. Her boss gives her cheese to sell, but it smells so bad that no one will buy it. Persuaded by the crowd, Monkey finally forces herself to try the cheese and finds that it's delicious, but nobody believes her.

"Zombies" (Nov 2013 of Playboy) - High schoolers begin electrocuting themselves by applying a cardiac defibrillator's electrodes to their temples and turning it on, which results in permanent brain damage. Dubbing it "The Great Leap Backwards", more and more people begin electrocuting themselves in order to willfully return to a state of childlike ignorance. At the airport, the narrator, Trevor, applies the electrodes to his head and is about to turn it on, but his Uncle stops him.

"Loser" (Stories, 2010) - A fraternity called Zeta Delta has a rushing tradition where they take LSD and sit in the audience of a quiz game (based on The Price Is Right). One frat member makes it to the final round of the contest but, high on LSD, ends up bidding a "million, trillion gah-zillion dollars and ninety-nine cents", which disqualifies him from the game and ends up getting his would-be prizes given to the winner in addition to her prizes. The winner, an old woman, then dies of a heart attack onstage.

"Red Sultan's Big Boy" - A man buys his 13-year-old daughter Lisa an Arabian stallion to replace her horse which died the previous week. People shun the family and the horse, discussing rumors about its past, as the father begins to get calls from people offering increasing amounts of money for the horse. It's revealed that the horse appeared in a viral bestiality video in which a man died later of a ruptured colon. Lisa and her friends have all seen the video, and she is charging her friends to visit the horse and take selfies with it. Upon finding out that Lisa killed her previous horse in order to obtain the famous stallion from the video, her father releases the horse into the wild. (see Enumclaw horse sex case)

"Romance" (Aug 2011 of Playboy) - The overweight narrator talks about his previous girlfriend, who was also overweight, but eventually lost a significant amount of weight and began receiving attention from other men. It turned out she lost the weight due to cancer, and later died. He does not believe he will ever meet anyone, then at Lollapalooza he falls in love with an eccentric woman named Britney who seems out of his league. Despite his misgivings with his friends who think she is retarded, alcoholic, drug-addict, and a nymphomaniac, he marries her and has twins with her.

"Cannibal" (May 2013 of Playboy) - Written with many euphemisms. When a high school gym class is picking teams, neither team wants a boy nicknamed "Cannibal", who it is revealed once performed cunnilingus on a girl named Marcia Sanders who claimed to not have known she was pregnant. He sucks out and accidentally swallows the small fetus, earning him his nickname.

"Why Coyote Never had Money for Parking" - Another Aesop-esque folktale. Coyote works at Llewelyn Food and is married with a child. Every night, Coyote puts the baby in his car and slowly drive around town in order to get the baby to go to sleep. He meets Flamingo, a sex worker, and begins seeing her frequently, feeling guilty about his infidelity. Eventually, he finds out from his wife that Flamingo is a transvestite.

"Phoenix" - Ted's daughter April is blind as a result of toxoplasmosis triggered by their cat called Belinda Carlisle. In flashbacks, it's revealed that Ted's wife Rachel wanted him to get rid of the cat, fearing it would affect her pregnancy. When he refused, she began combing hairspray into the cat's fur and overfeeding it to get it to use the litter box more frequently. Knowing the cat used the granite in the gas fireplace as a litter box, she waited until the cat was in the fireplace, then turned it on. The burning cat then ran through the house, setting it alight, before dying upstairs.

"The Facts of Life" - Troy's father, determined to outdo his own father's explanation of sex, tells his son a story about two people having sex at a drive-in movie theatre. Using hand sanitizer to cover up an unpleasant smell, the encounter results in the man's genitals accidentally being set on fire. The story of the hand sanitizer accident itself is told as one extended run-on sentence.

"Cold Calling" - A high schooler named Bill (who lives in Walla Walla, Washington) tries to sell potential customers a floor mop called the Wonder Wet Wipe, a floor mop; but the callers keep side-tracking him and racially abuse him while he tries to keep to the sales script. He ends up pretending to be Hindu and forming a friendship over the phone with a girl he later finds out was lying about being Black.