Not forever, but for now : a novel / Chuck Palahniuk.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a hilarious horror satire about a family of professional killers responsible for the most atrocious events in history and the young brothers that are destined to take over.

Meet Otto and Cecil. Two brothers growing up privileged in the Welsh countryside. They enjoy watching nature shows, playing with their pet pony, impersonating their Grandfather...and killing the help. Murder is the family business after all. Downton Abbey, this is not.

However, it's not so easy to continue the family legacy with the constant stream of threats and distractions seemingly leaping from the hedgerow. First there is the matter of the veritable cavalcade of escaped convicts that keep showing up at their door. Not to mention the debaucherous new tutor who has a penchant for speaking in Greek and dismembering sex dolls. Then there's Mummy's burgeoning opioid addiction. And who knows where Daddy is. He just vanished one day after he and Mummy took a walk in the so called "Ghost Forest."

With Grandfather putting pressure on Otto to step up, it becomes clear that this will all end in only two ways: a nuclear apocalypse or just another day among the creeping thistle and tree peonies. And in a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, either are equally possible.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Palahniuk (The Invention of Sound) delivers a grisly yet hazy satire of slasher stories. Two 20-something brothers embrace a murderous strain of arrested development in their upper-crust household in present-day Wales, where they listen to stories from their contract killer grandfather, who claims to have offed Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe, and other celebrities. Despite their ages, the brothers still have governesses, and Cecil, who narrates, looks on while his older sibling, Otto, stabs one of them to death. Cecil also recounts Otto's other killings, among them a landscaper and the family's dog. There are also heavy-handed hints about the brothers' incest. Episodes in the plotless mélange include Otto and Cecil creating a deranged lottery system for their neighbors, where the winner is killed in front of the other players, and their grandfather's ill-advised attempt to force Otto into the killing-for-hire racket. Palahniuk's unflinching approach to the macabre material is sure to please many of his fans, but the gratuitous violence and aimless narrative won't win any new ones. Fight Club this is not. Agent: Sloan Harris and Dan Kirschen, ICM Partners. (Sept.)

Booklist Review

Otto and Cecil spend their days watching nature documentaries in the nursery of their family's manse in the Welsh countryside. The voice of their childhood is that of Richard Attenborough, softly narrating how the baby giraffe is about to be feasted upon by a pride of lions. The boys are attended to by a team of nannies, tutors, cooks, and butlers, most of whom meet an untimely end. This being a Palahniuk novel, the boys are also well into adulthood, somewhere between "a mewling tot and a drooling codger" yet remain in a state of suspended childhood since daddy disappeared and they stopped tracking time. Calendars are not advanced; birthdays are no longer celebrated. The boys are expected to take over the family business of bumping off celebrities who are "damaging their brand." Past "clients" include Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Di. Palahniuk expresses a coal-black humor that unsparingly and brilliantly satirizes contemporary society. The uninitiated reader might find some content objectionable--the very same satirical content Palahniuk's legion of fans has come to expect and relish.

Kirkus Book Review

A pair of infantile, homicidal brothers decide to take over the family business. Aiming Palahniuk's profanely giddy rhetoric at the tea-and-crumpets crowd popularized by Downton Abbey and its ilk sounds like more fun than it turns out to be here. The book utterly unloads with both barrels in a sadistic folktale that aims to satirize homophobia, celebrity death culture, and the British class system all at once, but this much transgressive glee might be more than readers expect. To listen to their rhetoric at the beginning of this short novel, one might think Otto and Cecil really are the "twee, feeble, measly boys" they imagine themselves to be, complete with a nanny to bathe them and tuck them in at night in their manor in the Welsh countryside. It's a different picture once you get past unreliable narrator Cecil's flowery prose and realize the wee brothers are actually 20-something young men with a freakish, drug-addicted mother and a patently far-fetched predilection for rape, sodomy, and the lash. They also apparently have a future in the family business, where their grandfather Sir Richard supposedly manages the course of history. From Kent State to the Stonewall riots to the AIDS crisis, we learn all these pivotal events were the result of the family trade --their mother responsible for flashing a strobe light in a Parisian tunnel, or their grandfather administering a phenobarbital and champagne enema to Judy Garland in 1969. "Those misdeeds that need doing," as Cecil explains, include the deaths of figures like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and Diana, Princess of Wales, among others. If the history askew doesn't grab you, by all means stay for the plethora of servant murders ("Then there was the year the maid got herself killed. Don't ask me which") or the rapists and killers Otto goads into visiting or the tutor Otto buggers so senseless that he gives himself over to the little bastards' ministrations to make him more like them. A garish, sticky confabulation, equal parts saccharine caricature and startling raunch. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.