Shock Induction (2024) is the latest novel from Chuck Palahniuk (note the standard spelling; the query used a common variant). Published by Simon & Schuster in October 2024, it’s a slim, roughly 240-page dark satirical parable that blends dystopian speculation, postmodern experimentation, and hypnotic literary tricks.

I have previously reviewed Palahniuk’s “Not Forever, But For Now”.

Another Chuck Palahniuk novel to review… and another disappointment and let down. Am I getting older and growing out of Chuck? Or is Chuck growing out of Chuck himself? Is he just a shell of his former self or is it that there are too many other authors in a similar vein? Perhaps my joy of his writing style just isn’t there anymore. I’m not sure, but lets dive into a bit with this review.

Shock Induction by Chuck Palahniuk

Back of Book Cover Blurb

The description and back of the cover blurb on Shock Induction, by Chuck Palahniuk, as per GoodReads:

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?

–Shock Induction (GoodReads)

Book Review

Description

The story is set in 2037 and centers on Samantha Deel, a precocious, talented high-schooler (strong student and aspiring singer) trapped in a grotesque, abusive home life with pill-popping, gasoline-huffing parents and a lecherous uncle. At her school, the best and brightest students are vanishing one by one—officially chalked up to suicides, but something far more sinister is at play. These overachievers have been tracked since birth through “Greener Pastures,” a shadowy online surveillance and auction platform where billionaires and elites bid on young talent. The winning bid buys a teenager’s entire future: their intellectual labor, creativity, and life in exchange for vast wealth and “security.” It’s framed as an irresistible deal in a world where following your dreams looks riskier than selling your soul to the highest bidder.

Palahniuk layers in government experiments with “ERE poisoning” (chemicals supposedly laced into books to manipulate readers’ emotions and focus) and weaves in real hypnotic techniques. The title itself refers to “shock induction”—a sudden jolt (a word, image, or repetition) used in hypnosis to break someone out of their normal thought stream and make them suggestible. The narrative itself tries to do this to you, the reader: short, pointillistic chapters that mimic doom-scrolling on a phone, sudden fourth-wall breaks (“Psych!”), pages of repetitive mantras (like the word “avocado”), and interpolated passages or quotes from classics (The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare, David Copperfield). The prose swings between minimalist and maximalist, surreal and deadpan, laced with Palahniuk’s signature grotesque humor, drugs, sexual weirdness, and off-color jokes.

At its core it’s a scathing update on themes he’s explored since Fight Club: the illusion of choice under late-stage capitalism, the commodification of human potential, the failures of the American education system, surveillance as the new normal, and language itself as the ultimate brainwashing tool. It’s pitched (by reviewers) as The Truman Show meets The Hunger Games meets Euphoria with an Alice in Wonderland twist—a “coming-of-rage” story about a rebellious misfit trying to seize control of her own narrative.

Critique

Shock Induction is Palahniuk doing what he does best—weaponizing the novel form itself—but pushed further into experimental territory than most of his post-Fight Club work. The meta-hypnosis gimmick is genuinely clever and ambitious: the book isn’t just about mind control and commodified youth; it tries to perform it on the reader through repetition, disorientation, and literary Easter eggs. When it works, the effect is unsettling and exhilarating; clarity dissolves, you feel the trance setting in, and the satire lands with real sting. Samantha is one of his stronger recent protagonists—empathetic, furious, and believable in her teen angst without tipping into caricature—and the surreal set pieces and dark humor keep the pages turning even when the structure gets labyrinthine.

Many longtime fans (including some reviewers) hail it as his strongest book in years—a return to the subversive, mind-bending energy of Rant, Haunted, Invisible Monsters, or Survivor after some recent misfires. It’s a love letter to reading itself, treating literature as a drug that can rewire you, while simultaneously daring casual readers to keep up. The collage style (short bursts juxtaposed like phone-scrolling potato chips) and pointillistic convergence of tiny disparate pieces can deliver more emotional punch in a few pages than many linear novels manage in hundreds.

That said, the very things that make it bold also make it divisive. Goodreads sits at a lukewarm ~3.2/5, and plenty of readers find the non-linear, confusion-inducing structure maddening or opaque rather than hypnotic. Supporting characters often feel thin, some sections read like scattered messes, and the second-person social-commentary passages occasionally tip from playful into preachy. It alienates fans who just want another tight, accessible gut-punch like Choke or Fight Club; this one demands endurance and rewards re-reading (you’ll almost certainly miss references the first time). The “hypnosis on the reader” trick can backfire into frustration instead of fascination.

Ultimately, Shock Induction is Palahniuk evolving on purpose—pushing away from the persona that made him famous thirty years ago and challenging readers to grow with him. It’s not a perfect or universally enjoyable novel, but it’s a fearless, fucked-up, thought-provoking one that lingers like a literary contact high (or poisoning). If you’re in the mood for a chaotic, satirical fever dream that treats the act of reading as both salvation and trap, it delivers. If you want straightforward storytelling, you’ll probably feel hypnotized… into putting it down early. Worth trying if you’ve ever loved Palahniuk at his weirdest.

In the lineage of writers who have stared into the abyss of human commodification—Camus’s stranger alienated from meaning, Orwell’s Winston broken by surveillance, Beckett’s figures reduced to waiting in ashbins, Ligotti’s puppets aware of their strings—Chuck Palahniuk has long positioned himself as the American heir apparent. His early work weaponized the grotesque to expose the hollow core of consumerist masculinity and corporate myth-making. Yet with Shock Induction (2024), that once-sharp blade has dulled into something closer to performative frenzy, a book that gestures toward profundity while mostly succeeding in exhausting the reader.

The premise arrives with the familiar Palahniuk bite: in a near-future 2037, elite high-school students are vanishing, not into suicide as the official story claims, but into literal auctions run by the shadowy “Greener Pastures” platform. Billionaires bid on youthful potential, purchasing entire futures in exchange for wealth and security. Samantha Deel, our narrator and aspiring singer, navigates this dystopia amid abusive parents, hallucinogenic experiments, and the book’s central gimmick: “shock induction” itself, a hypnotic technique mirrored in the prose through repetition, fourth-wall ruptures, interpolated passages from Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Shakespeare, and Alice in Wonderland, and pages that dissolve into mantras (“avocado” repeated ad nauseam) meant to disorient and entrance.

Palahniuk’s writing style has, over the past two decades, settled into a predictable pattern of these same formal tricks. What once felt revolutionary— the fractured timelines of Rant, the typographic assaults of Invisible Monsters, the oral-history collage of Snuff—now reads like a signature stamp applied to every new manuscript. Repetition is not a scalpel but a blunt instrument; gaps and white space are not voids of existential dread (as in Beckett or Ligotti) but literal breathing room inserted between micro-chapters. The fourth-wall asides, the sudden “Psych!” interruptions, the pages of single-word loops: these are no longer innovations but reflexes, the literary equivalent of muscle memory that has atrophied into tic.

One cannot escape the suspicion that an editor’s quiet directive hovers over every draft: hit the page quota. Where Steinbeck or Orwell achieved devastating economy by saying only what must be said, Palahniuk appears to pad deliberately—repeating phrases until they lose all charge, stretching single ideas across blank expanses, tossing in extraneous literary quotations not for resonance but for bulk. The result is a book that feels contractually obligated to be a novel rather than artistically compelled to exist. The hypnosis gimmick, meant to indict the reader’s own suggestibility under late capitalism, instead indicts the author’s reliance on the same old bag of effects to reach an arbitrary word count. What could have been a lean, Camus-like parable of commodified youth balloons into a repetitive fever dream that mistakes quantity for hypnotic depth.

The intent behind all this is clear, even admirable on paper. Palahniuk seeks to make the novel a literal instrument of mind control, turning reading into a drugged experience that critiques how language, surveillance, and late capitalism erode autonomy. One can almost hear the echo of Freud’s talking cure gone wrong, or Vonnegut’s meta-fictional winks in Slaughterhouse-Five, but stripped of restraint and replaced with frantic collage. Where Lewis (C.S.) might have layered allegory with moral gravity, Palahniuk opts for bombardment: short, pointillist chapters mimicking doom-scrolling, sudden “Psych!” interjections, grotesque sexual asides, and chemical-laced absurdities.

The result is less hypnotic than irritating. The experimental form—once innovative—here feels like exhaustion rather than revelation. The narrative fractures so relentlessly that coherence becomes optional; supporting characters blur into caricatures, and the satire lands with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The commodification of youth is a potent theme, ripe for existential dread in the tradition of Orwell or Camus, yet it is buried under so much noise—and so much visible filler—that the critique flattens into gesture. One finishes the book not enlightened or unsettled, but merely relieved the assault has ended.

For readers who prize the stoic endurance of Beckett’s minimalism or the quiet terror of Ligotti’s cosmic pessimism, Shock Induction offers only sporadic glimpses of what might have been: a few razor-sharp lines on the illusion of choice, a haunting image of potential sold at auction. But these moments are drowned in excess. Palahniuk, who once channeled Lynchian surrealism with precision, now seems content to mimic its chaos without the underlying discipline.

This is not the abyss staring back; it is the abyss shouting over itself until the reader walks away. Two stars: for ambition that occasionally flickers, and for reminding us how far the once-vital provocateur has wandered from the clarity that made his best work endure.

See Also: Book Review: Not Forever But For Now (Chuck Palahniuk)

Chuck’s Writing Fall Off

Chuck Palahniuk arrived in the 1990s like a literary Molotov cocktail, his early novels—Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby—delivering a visceral, black-comic assault on consumerist masculinity and the hollow rituals of late capitalism. In those books the grotesque served the satire: every spilled bodily fluid or deadpan monologue felt necessary, the way Vonnegut’s absurdism or Orwell’s surveillance state felt necessary. The prose was economical, the formal tricks earned, and the reader emerged shaken but strangely clarified, as if the author had performed a controlled demolition on the American Dream. For a time Palahniuk stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the writers this ledger reveres: a pulp Camus, a Lynch of the paperback rack, a stoic who refused to look away from the abyss and instead spat into it.

By the mid-2000s the trajectory had already begun its slow, unmistakable descent. Snuff, Pygmy, and Tell-All retained the surface shocks but lost the underlying necessity; the transgressive elements started to feel like contractual obligations rather than organic eruptions. What had once been radical fragmentation—Invisible Monsters’ typographic violence, Rant’s oral-history collage—hardened into a reusable template. Repetition, once a hypnotic scalpel, became a blunt hammer. The fourth-wall asides, the sudden “Psych!” interjections, the pages of single-word loops or white space masquerading as existential pause: these no longer destabilized the reader so much as they announced, with increasing weariness, that Chuck Palahniuk was doing the Chuck Palahniuk thing again. Where Beckett pared language to the bone until silence itself screamed, Palahniuk began padding the silence with filler, as if an editor’s page-count quota had become the true antagonist.

The later novels—Adjustment Day, The Invention of Sound, and especially Shock Induction—confirm the pattern has calcified into self-parody. Each new book arrives with the same checklist: a dystopian premise commodifying human potential, a precocious narrator steeped in pop-culture detritus, interpolated literary quotations that feel less like dialogue with the canon and more like literary name-dropping to pad the word count. The hypnosis gimmick in Shock Induction is emblematic: what could have been a lean, Camus-like parable about the auctioning of youth instead bloats into repetitive mantras and micro-chapters that mimic doom-scrolling so faithfully they induce the very boredom they purport to critique. One senses the author no longer trusts the story to carry its own weight; instead he stretches, repeats, and inserts gaps the way a contractor adds unnecessary drywall to meet square-footage requirements.

This is not the gentle maturation of a Steinbeck or the deliberate minimalism of a Ligotti; it is artistic entropy. The once-fearless provocateur now seems trapped inside the very brand he helped create, recycling the same shocks until they lose their voltage. The result is work that gestures toward the abyss but never quite stares into it—content instead to shout the same slogans louder, longer, and with more white space. For readers who still demand the stoic clarity and moral gravity that once defined Palahniuk at his best, the decline is not merely disappointing; it is a quiet betrayal of the very transgressive promise that made his early books endure.

Overall Rating

I gave Chuck Palahniuk’s Shock Induction two stars in my review because, while the premise holds genuine promise, the execution ultimately collapses under the weight of its own exhausted tricks. The novel imagines a near-future where talented teenagers are auctioned off to billionaires through a platform called “Greener Pastures,” framed through the lens of hypnotic “shock induction” techniques that the prose itself tries to replicate via repetition, fourth-wall breaks, literary collages from Gatsby, Moby-Dick, and Shakespeare, and pages filled with looping mantras. I acknowledged the ambition—echoing themes from Camus, Orwell, and early Palahniuk—but found the fragmented, pointillist style and constant interruptions less hypnotic than irritating. What once felt radical in his work now reads like a tired formula: short chapters mimicking doom-scrolling, gratuitous white space, and repeated phrases that seem designed more to pad the page count than to deepen the satire on commodified youth and surveillance capitalism. The result is a book that gestures toward existential dread but delivers mostly noise and caricature, leaving the reader relieved when it ends rather than unsettled or enlightened.

Looking back at my review, I see it as a lament for Palahniuk’s artistic decline. His early novels delivered necessary grotesquerie with precision and purpose; now the same tools—repetition, meta asides, grotesque asides—feel recycled and obligatory, lacking the stoic economy of Beckett, the cosmic quiet of Ligotti, or the moral clarity of Orwell and Steinbeck. I rated it two stars to reflect that disappointment: flashes of potential exist, but they drown in excess and self-parody. In the future, I hope Palahniuk steps away from the branded formula that has calcified around him. A leaner, more disciplined novel—one that trusts the story instead of padding it—could rediscover the raw power that once made his voice essential, letting the abyss stare back with fresh clarity rather than shouting the same slogans louder and longer.

My GoodReads Rating: ** out of *****
My LibraryThing Rating: ** out of *****
Overall GoodReads Rating: 3.16 (as of 3.14.26)

Other Book Reviews

• Book Review: The Greatest Beer Run Ever (John Chick Donohue and J.T. Molloy)

• Book Review: Subpar Parks: America’s Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors (Amber Share)

• Book Review: Courage is Calling (Ryan Holiday)

• Book Review: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (Carlo M. Cipolla)

• Book Review: Brewed in Japan (Jeffrey Alexander)

• Book Review: The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (Armand M. Nicholi Jr.)

• Book Review: Family Reins (Billy Busch)

• Book Review: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World (Riley Black)

• Book Review: The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde)

• Book Review: Create Dangerously (Albert Camus)
• Book Review: The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
• Book Review: The Donnie Darko Book (Richard Kelly)
• Book Review: How to Rule the World: A Handbook for the Aspiring Dictator (André de Guillaume)
• Book Review: Here is New York (E.B. White)
• Book Review: Uncle John’s Beer Topia
• Book Review: I Drink For a Reason (David Cross)
• Book Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
• Book Review: Siddhartha’s Brain: Unlocking the Ancient Science of Enlightenment (James Kingsland)
• Book Review: Atomic Habits (James Clear)
• Book Review: A Significant Life (Todd May)
• Book Review: Not Forever But For Now (Chuck Palahniuk)
• Book Review: The Psychology of Zelda (edited by Anthony M. Bean)

Follow The Beer Thrillers

For more updates on Pennsylvania brewery news, closures, openings, and expansions, follow The Beer Thrillers on social media and subscribe for the latest articles on the state’s ever-evolving craft beer scene. Search for us on all of your favorite social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, etc.) – search “THE BEER THRILLERS”. Thanks.

Thank You For Reading

If you like this article, please check out our other many articles, including news, beer reviews, travelogues, maps, and much much more. We greatly appreciate everyone visiting the site!

Cheers.

Thanks again for reading everyone. Take some time to check out the site, we greatly appreciate it. We have affiliates and sponsors with Pretzels.com and Beer Drop.com, which can save you money on their products if you are interested. Check out our articles on them. Make sure to check out our beer reviews, brewery reviews, Amy’s weekly column, book reviews, hike reviews, and so much more.

As always, thank you everyone for reading! Leave your likes, comments, suggestions, questions, etc, in the comments section. Or use the Feedback – Contact Us – page, and we’ll get right back to you! You can also reach out to us at our direct e-mail address: thebeerthrillers@gmail.com

Thank you for visiting our blog. Please make sure to follow, bookmark, subscribe, and make sure to comment and leave feedback and like the blog posts you read. It will help us to better tailor the blog to you, the readers, likes and make this a better blog for everyone.

We are working on a massive project here at The Beer Thrillers. We are creating a map of all of the breweries across the United States. State by state we are adding maps of all of the different states with every brewery in each state. (We will eventually get to the US Territories, as well as the Canadian Provinces, and possibly more countries; as well as doing some fun maps like a map of all the breweries we’ve been to, and other fun maps.) You can find the brewery maps here:

• MAPS OF BREWERIES

We are also working on a project of creating printable and downloadable PDFs and resources to be able to check and keep track of all of the breweries you’ve been to. So stay tuned for that project once we are finished with the Brewery Maps of the US States.

You can check out our different directories here: Beer Reviews, Hike Reviews, Book Reviews, Brewery News, Brewery Openings, Brewer Interviews, and Travelogues.

Please be sure to follow us on our social media accounts – Facebook, Facebook Group, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Influence. As well as our brand new Tumblr page. Please be sure to also follow, like, subscribe to the blog here itself to keep updated. We are also now on BlueSky as well, so make sure to check us out there also. We love to hear from you guys, so be sure to leave a comment and let us know what you think!

You can now find us on our Discord Server here: The Beer Thrillers (Discord Server).

We also now have a SLACK channel – which acts as a hybrid chat room, message board, Reddit style; workspace and posting area for us. You can hang out with us there and chat about all kinds of things – not just beer, but “off topic” things like movies, TV, books, podcasts, hiking, sports, and more! Join us at: The Beer Thrillers on SLACK.

We’ve also joined LinkTree to keep track of all of our social media pages, as well as hot new articles we’ve written. The Beer Thrillers on LinkTree can be found here: The Beer Thrillers LinkTree.

We have partnered with an affiliateship with Beer Drop.com. You can check out that partnership and receive great discounts, coupons, and more here: Beer Drop. Going here and logging in and ordering will help you receive your discounts and coupons as well as help support our page. Thank you for helping to support The Beer Thrillers and to help us maintain the site and blog and to keep it running.

The Beer Thrillers are a blog that prides itself on writing beer reviews, brewery reviews, travelogues, news (especially local to the Central PA brewery scene), as well as covering other topics of our interests – such as hiking, literature and books, board games, and video games which we sometimes stream with our friends over at Knights of Nostalgia. We are currently listed as #5 on FeedSpot’s “Top 100 Beer Blogs” and #9 on FeedSpot’s “Top 40 Pennsylvania Blogs”. (As of May 2025.) Thank you for reading our site today, please subscribe, follow, and bookmark. Please reach out to us if you are interested in working together. If you would like to donate to the blog you can here: Donate to The Beer Thrillers. Thank you!

You can also check out our partnership and affiliation with Pretzels.com, where ordering pretzels and using our affiliate code – AFFILIATE CODE IS THEBEERTHRILLERS20 – will help you get wonderful pretzels and help us maintain and keep this blog running. Thank you!

If you would like to reach out to us for product reviews, beer reviews, press release writing, and other media – please contact us at thebeerthrillers@gmail.com. Thank you.

(Thank you for reading. The opinions, thoughts, and expressions of each article posted on The Beer Thrillers represents the author of the content and only themselves. It does not express the opinions, beliefs, or ideas held by The Beer Thrillers or any company in which the author themselves work for. Each piece of written content is written by the creator(s) listed in the authorial section on each article unless otherwise noted. Their opinions, comments, and words on screen do not represent any company in which they work for and / or are affiliated with or any non – profits that they contribute to. Thank you.)

]]> 16816 https://thebeerthrillers.com/2022/06/23/book-review-of-mice-and-men-john-steinbeck/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=book-review-of-mice-and-men-john-steinbeck Thu, 23 Jun 2022 12:40:00 +0000 https://thebeerthrillers.com/?p=9421

School Time

Who remembers high school? (I’m going to go ahead and assume everyone coming to a beer blog, even for literature reviews, is most likely out of high school and hopefully over the age of 21…. otherwise this is a little awkward.) Maybe even middle school, depending on your age and your school district. Either way, Of Mice and Men is a typically required book for most English classes in high school or middle school in America.

Most people don’t enjoy school, or didn’t enjoy school, and I will admit I am no exception to that. I was never a big fan of middle school, or high school, or even the little college I did have – I wasn’t sold on. As Mark Twain said: “Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.” This is pretty much one of the biggest things I can fully agree on, and one of the biggest reasons why I read roughly a hundred books a year. I did actually enjoy the assigned reading books we got in the school I went to. Some of these were ‘To Kill a Mockingbird‘, ‘Of Mice and Men’, ‘Flowers for Algernon’, ‘Catcher in the Rye’, and several others.

Of Mice and Men actually started my love for John Steinbeck in general, and I’ve read most of his works since. The Pearl, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, The Red Pony, Travels with Charley, The Moon is Down, The Long Valley, The Cup of Gold, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, etc.

I have not yet tackled his big (huge) tomes of books – Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. They are on my shelf, waiting to be read, and I do want to tackle them, its more like trying to find the time to do so than feeling obligated or not wanting to read it. I think with Grapes of Wrath, there is also the sense that through cultural osmosis I already know the book to some degree, so that tends to push it down lower on my TRP (to read pile). But don’t worry, once I get around to them and reading them, I’ll be sure to be throwing up a review here on the blog.

What books did you guys have to read in school? Did you like them or not? I find it fascinating how there’s kind of a ‘core curriculum’ but still lots of other books that get taught and read in School X but not in School Y, etc.

John Steinbeck

Wikipedia’s opening paragraph and brief biography of John Steinbeck reads:

“John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (/ˈstaɪnbɛk/; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.”^[2] He has been called “a giant of American letters.”^[3][4]

During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939)^[5] is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon.^[6] In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.^[7]

Most of Steinbeck’s work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.”

John Steinbeck (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia has him listed for 33 pieces of work of at least novella size. Two of these are books of short stories. Thats an impressive list, all of them published between the years of 1929 and 2012. (The one is a film and was released shortly after his passing. There is four books that are credited as being published posthumously.

Of Mice and Men

The Wikipedia description for Of Mice and Men on John Steinbeck’s above page reads:

“Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written as a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930s America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck’s best known works. It was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.”

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck page) (Wikipedia)

The full Wikipedia page devoted to Of Mice and Men gives the following brief summary / description:

“Of Mice and Men is a novella written by John Steinbeck.^[1][2] Published in 1937, it narrates the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States.

Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences working alongside migrant farm workers as a teenager in the 1910s (before the arrival of the Okies that he would describe in The Grapes of Wrath). The title is taken from Robert Burns‘ poem “To a Mouse“, which reads: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley”. (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry.)

While it is a book taught in many schools,^[3] Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censors for vulgarity, and what some consider offensive and racist language; consequently, it appears on the American Library Association‘s list of the Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century.^[4]“

Of Mice and Men (Wikipedia)

GoodReads blurb on ‘Of Mice and Men’:

“I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s
why.”

They are an unlikely pair: George is “small and quick and dark of face”; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a “family,” clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California’s dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. But George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.

While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck’s work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing ‘Of Mice and Men’ (1937), creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. But though the scope is narrow, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual’s existence meaningful.

A unique perspective on life’s hardships, this story has achieved the status of timeless classic due to its remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.

Of Mice and Men (GoodReads)

Book Review

I think most people reading this blog post will already at the very least know the broad strokes of the book. Its part of that general “cultural osmosis” that I believe we all have. Where certain themes, books, films / movies, plays, music, etc is just ingrained in us through culture. For example, knowing Vader is Luke’s father (SPOILER!!!!!!), or Homer’s Odyssey, or the Iliad, or Hamlet, Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, etc. These are just themes and ideas and story beats that we all just ‘know’. Even if you’ve never read, or seen, or viewed the source material itself.

This is a novella and very short, with few set pieces and locations. I can see how it originated as a play (the entire time I was re-reading this, I thought this would make an excellent play, and while researching it a bit for this post I came to realize it was originally planned as a play). Its 103 pages (in this edition) and each chapter starts off with a page of flowery prose, and then goes into sparse and tight prose, with much more emphasis on dialogue.

The main characters are George (Milton) and Lennie (Small). The two ‘team together’ working farm after farm as ranch hands. George is the ‘brains’ and Lennie is the ‘muscle’. George is smart in the worldly sense; whereas Lennie is a big, most likely mentally retarded in some fashion, muscular “oaf”. He routinely gets them in trouble due to his inability to control his actions and his strength.

The main thrust of the plot starts when they get to the ranch and they begin working there. The owner’s son Curley is a hot head with a Napoleon complex. His wife is collectively called a “tart”, “a tramp”, and other such 1930s era words for a seemingly promiscuous and ‘looking’ married woman.

The entire story has a sense of impending doom. A foreboding gloom that we just know the dreams and hopes of George, Lennie, and then eventually Candy, will never come to fruition. The sense of impending doom, the foreboding nature, and the sense that it will all fall apart looms over the pages prose. Especially every time Curley or (even more so) Curley’s wife walks onto the page. The interaction with Carlson and Candy about his dog is foreshadowing at its absolute best.

I won’t get into the tragic ending, for spoiler reasons, and since most people know it anyway. But needless to say – the ending is tragic, foreseeable, and sadly enough – probably not preventable. Especially given all the combustible elements (namely people) at that point in the story. What happens between Lennie and Curley’s wife, and then how George has to take care of it. And doing so in the way that Candy was not willing to do with his dog – although he laments it and says afterwards that he should have done it himself – is all chilling, sad, and very tragic.

Themes

The best laid plans of mice and men as William Shakespeare would say. The bindle boys, the moving ranchers that go from ranch to ranch, and work for their stakes always just end up blowing it in cat houses, in gamble dens, or in bars. Never actually holding onto it and getting their land, but yet they all dream of it. Their all dreaming of that land. Especially George and Lennie, and then Candy getting involved in their plans.

The biggest theme is ‘taking care of your own business’. The way Candy realizes after Carlson puts down his dog that he should have done it. And the way George knows at the end that he has to be the one who puts Lennie down for his tragedy and for his own good. The idea of doing whats right, and not letting others have to do the hard tasks, as Ned Stark says in the first book of the Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones) – the one who passes the judgement should be the one who has to use the sword. Confronting the harsh, hard, and unforgiving parts of the nature of things.

For such a short novella, and with it mostly dialogue, it does pack in the setting well, the bleak sense of desperation and loneliness that the ranchers have, their lives of just going from farm and ranch to farm and ranch and working the land for others. Modern day serfs. Working the land for others, blowing their money, living in run down cabin bunk houses, worried about being canned, worried about others stealing their stuff, etc.

Overall Thoughts

I’m going to come off as heavily biased here and just outright say it – this is one of my all time favorite books. So this will most likely come off as biased or maybe ‘tipping the scales’. But…..

My GoodReads Rating: *****
My LibraryThing Rating: ****.5
Average GoodReads Rating: 3.88 (as of 6.23.22)

Here’s a funny line from a GoodReads review:

The title of this novel is only 50% accurate, a very poor effort. Yes, it’s about men, but there’s little or nothing about mice in these pages. Mice enthusiasts will come away disappointed.

Paul Bryant Review

Links

For more Of Mice and Men links, check out these:

• John Steinbeck (Wikipedia)
• Of Mice and Men (Wikipedia)
• Of Mice and Men (GoodReads)

Interested in more book reviews by us here at The Beer Thrillers?

Then check out these book reviews (and note – this is only a sampling):

• Book Review: Machiavelli – The Art of Teaching People What to Fear (Patrick Boucheron)
• Book Review: For The Love of Beer (Dr. Alison E. Feeney)
• Book Event: For the Love of Beer Event
• Book Review: The Wit and Wisdom of Tyrion Lannister (George R.R. Martin)
• Book Review: The Atlas of Tolkien (David Day)
• Book Review: 9-11 (Noam Chomsky)
• Book Review: Curb Your Enthusiasm and Philosophy
• Book Review: Buddhism 101 (Arnie Kozak)
• Book Review: Plotted (Andrew DeGraff)
• Book Review: The Philosophy of Snoopy (Charles M. Schulz)
• Book Review: Star Wars: The Guardians of the Whils (Greg Rucka)
• Book Review: On Bullshit (Harry G. Frankfurt)
• Book Reviews: Star Wars: The Jedi Path and The Book of the Sith (Daniel Wallace)

Some new recent beer news and blog posts we have done:

• Macklin Brewing Company in Development
• Arboretum Trail Brewing Company Opens Their Doors
• Torture Brewing Company Kickstarter Campaign

Thanks For Reading

Thanks for reading everyone. I got lots of articles and posts in the upcoming weeks. We are also going to be starting another tournament series for July. This time a battle of the beers rather than a battle of the breweries. So be on the look out for more details about that. I have a pile of books I’ve recently finished reading, and the reviews will be coming in shortly. So if you enjoy our book reviews, stick around for that! If you are here for the beer posts, don’t worry, we have plenty in that department as well!

So stay tuned!

Stay cool in these hot end of June and early July days. Keep a cold beer in your hand to help out!

Cheers All!

-B. Kline

As always, thank you everyone for reading! Leave your likes, comments, suggestions, questions, etc, in the comments section. Or use the Feedback – Contact Us – page, and we’ll get right back to you! You can also reach out to us at our direct e-mail address: thebeerthrillers@gmail.com

Thank you for visiting our blog. Please make sure to follow, bookmark, subscribe, and make sure to comment and leave feedback and like the blog posts you read. It will help us to better tailor the blog to you, the readers, likes and make this a better blog for everyone.

You can check out our different directories here: Beer Reviews, Hike Reviews, Book Reviews, Brewery News, Brewery Openings, Brewer Interviews, and Travelogues.

Please be sure to follow us on our social media accounts – Facebook, Facebook Group, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Influence. Please be sure to also follow, like, subscribe to the blog here itself to keep updated. We love to hear from you guys, so be sure to leave a comment and let us know what you think!