If you know of Chuck Palahniuk’s work, it’s probably through David Fincher’s film adaptation of his debut novel Fight Club or subsequent books such as Choke and Survivor, tales of alienated misanthropic misfits struggling to interact with their fellow humans using all manner of con-jobs and dysfunctional ‘coping mechanisms’ (Choke’s sex-addicted Victor Mancini pays for his dementia-stricken mother’s hospital care by faking his own death-by-asphyxiation in restaurants and living off the financial gifts offered by those who Heimlich-maneouvre him back to life, as you do).
The Portland-based novelist has been hammering out a book a year since the mid '90s, carving out a niche for himself as a latter day Vonnegut-ian moralist-cum-satirist. But post-9/11, Palahniuk reckoned it was all over for transgressive tales of angry young saboteurs, so in the tradition of Stepford Wives/Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin, he devoted his attentions to rehabilitating and subverting the horror genre with yarns like Lullaby and Diary. His latest book Haunted, described as a ‘novel of short stories’, is the third part of the horror trilogy (he says science fiction is next), and has gained notoriety by way of its opening story ‘Guts’, a beautifully sphincter-tightening tale of masturbation-gone-horribly-wrong.
On his last promotional tour, Palahniuk read ‘Guts’ every night, and every night there were casualties, men and women turning pale, sweating and slumping to the floor as he read. As the body count mounted, the situation began to resemble the plot of his fifth novel Lullaby, whose central conceit concerned an ancient African culling song with the power to kill. (For the full story, read Palahniuk’s letter to booksellers at www.haunted-thebook.com).
Palahniuk reckons the ‘Guts’ body count has reached 69, although he rarely performs the story anymore because most people have read it on the internet.
‘Guts’ isn’t even the most hardcore thing in Haunted, by far his most challenging (and, to be honest, patience-trying) book yet. Rather than anthologising stand-alone yarns, Palahniuk wove together 23 stories he’d harvested over the years into a tapestry akin to what Robert Altman did with Ray Carver’s stories in Short Cuts. The device Palahniuk employs to quilt all these stories together takes the form of a creepy writer’s retreat where the participants simultaneously try to out-do each other’s confessions and also sabotage their own survival in order to up the drama quotient. It ties together classical allusions – The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Byron and the Shelleys in the Villa Diodati – with dog-eat-dog reality TV shows, the contestants constantly imagining how their predicament will play better on television, to their own detriment.
“It’s not so much a parody of reality television, but much deeper,” says Palahniuk, “it’s more the idea of what their reality is. Right now with the internet and talk radio, so many different media outlets, everybody is constantly reinterpreting reality for us."
Palahniuk’s resistance to information-overload dates back to when he was writing the initial drafts of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters a decade ago.
“I moved to a place outside the city on the wrong side of a mountain,” he recalls. “There was no radio, no television, at the time there was no internet. I had nothing but books and maybe recorded music. And that’s all I had for about four to five years, and I really haven’t gone back to television since then. (When there’s a television on) you don’t really hold a narrative in your head, you don’t really tell stories, you’re always being subjected to other people’s reality; you don’t get to craft your own. You can’t gather together all the details if you’re always being washed and douched by the radio music or radio talk, all these other people imposing their stories on you.”
Consequently, Palahniuk’s books reach what is commonly regarded as a dead demographic in the book business: young males. Part of this is down to the subject matter, but it’s also due to the hyper-realistic, visceral nature of his prose.
“It helps if you’re writing books to think: ‘What is the real strength of books, what can they do that film and music can’t?” he says. “I can do things in books that movies could never ever do ’cos they’d cost too much to make. Movies are passive, people may or may not want to see them, but with a book you have a private consensual audience of one person, and that person has to make an ongoing effort to get through the story. And it costs so little to produce. That’s the strength of books.”