First blog post for independent reading!

The book I'm reading is Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk.
I'm only on page 67, but so far it's INSANE. And moderately disturbing. Here we go.

Page 37-38:
"Then Angelique does what you've never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Lenny's sole. Angelique cups her lips around Lenny's heel, and Lenny starts to moan.
Don't laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worse job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he's found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmot.
We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.
This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Lenny moaned and thrashed. After Angelique mouthed his foot until the one long moment Lenny sat up on the mattresses, clutching his chest in both hands and gaping his open mouth at her still sucking his heel. After his heart stopped, Angelique pulled the bedsheets up to his chin. She wiped the lipstick off his foot and smeared more around her mouth. She unplugged his phones and told the guards Lenny was taking a long nap."

This passage really helps to develop theme for me. The theme I see so far in this book is that "People who seem normal sometimes have dark and disturbing secrets." The passage illustrates how a girl (Angelique), whom the storyteller (Mother Nature) used to know, began to do different things with her life. She started as a foot masseuse, and progressed into doing worse and more dangerous jobs with her skills. This story out of the book tells the dark secret of a rich, beautiful woman, and talks about how a lot of rich people got their money by learning the technique of making a person's body respond in obscure ways by massaging different parts of their feet. This passage directly contributes to the theme, as does one of the other stories told by a boy who's secret is that his intestines got sucked out of his butt by the drain on the bottom of his swimming pool and he survived. And yes, that one is based on a true story of someone Chuck Palahniuk knows... yikes.

I predict that the stories being told are going to get much worse, even though that seems nearly impossible after the story about the pool drain...