For more than two decades, Chuck Palahniuk has been holding up a dark mirror so that we might view ourselves—all too often leading us to wonder, is the darkness within the mirror or within our own psyches? Palahniuk’s works have been hailed as “astonishing,” “diabolical,” “powerful,” “important.” His reality-bending tales have sparked debate and stirred controversy.

Now, Palahniuk has returned home to the publisher that launched his career 22 years ago with Fight Club. W. W. Norton & Co. has released Adjustment Day ($26.95), a book that does for the current apocalyptic zeitgeist what Fight Club did for ’90scorporate unease. Indeed, Palahniuk has said: “Adjustment Day is to Fight Club what Atlas Shrugged is to The Fountainhead—a bigger package of bold characters and norm-bashing ideas.”

In this devastating and comic novel of rebellion, he looks at the heart of America and finds it frightening. Palahniuk has never pulled his punches. Here is a book designed to challenge, to provoke, to enrage—everyone. Adjustment Day tells the story of a United States on the brink of chaos—a simmering cauldron, ready to boil over.

The book calls to mind a politicized Hieronymus Bosch panel, wherein the disaffected citizens of a lost world prepare to take control—or blow everything up trying. And the directives for these widespread acts of malice and assassination all seem to be coming from a single source: a mysterious blue-black book with a gold-embossed cover.  A book that brands the carrier as a hero.  A volume found in no library, and which can be purchased in no bookshop.  A book that men carry “every day, everywhere, as they’d carry a flag into battle.”