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Ever since his debut with Fight Club, Palahniuk has established his cult reputation with a series of novels that walk a transgressive line between exaggerated social satire and a romantic nihilism that revels in the mass culture it skewers.

If Fight Club can be seen as an examination of masculine identity under mass consumption, then Beautiful You is its somewhat feminine equivalent. Penny Harrigan is a gender studies graduate now intern at a New York law firm with the vague ambition of becoming a lawyer, but feels trapped by expectations of what a woman should be despite feminist advances. Her life takes a turn when she attracts the interests of the world’s richest man, C. Linus Maxwell: a monstrously manipulative revising of Fifty Shades’ Christian Grey.

The plot then goes on a ludicrous, lewd and squirm-inducing arc that has become the author’s signature. Maxwell’s apocalyptic manipulation of female sexuality through hi-tech sex toys and “vampire romances” to establish a controlling influence over the world’s women is an outright condemnation of our current pop cultural landscape. Sadly, Palahniuk’s novel is held back by occasionally mistimed irreverence and a questionable denouement.