BOOKS :: SEPTEMBER 22, 2004

‘Fight Club’ author takes the word franchise to a whole new level

A reading and book signing with Chuck Palahniuk 7:30 p.m. Mon., Sept. 27, at Schuler Books and Music in the Eastwood Towne Center. Copies of his books will be available for purchase. Call (517) 316-7495 or visit www.schulerbooks.com for more information.

By WHITNEY SPOTTS

Chuck Palahniuk must know some seriously bizarre people.

“I would say easily 95 percent of what I write about is a true story that I’ve just fictionalized into a larger piece of work,” he says. “Because when you’re talking to strangers or talking to people at a party, that’s when you get the most unfiltered, most extraordinary stories in the world.”

Unfiltered and extraordinary is one way to describe tales of a con-artist who attends sex addict support group meetings to pick up chicks (“Choke”); of a sole death-cult survivor who used to run a pro-suicide hotline (“Survivor”); of a permanently disfigured former supermodel on a cross-country trip robbing houses while posing as a Realtor with her friend, a pre-op transsexual (“Invisible Monsters”).

Palahniuk has become a cult icon with his intense, brutal and darkly comedic fiction, thanks in no small part to the blockbuster success of the film adaptation of his second novel, “Fight Club.” And with a veritable franchise in the works — as of right now all of his novels except one (“Lullaby”) will eventually be turned into movies, “Fight Club” has become a video game, and discussions are underway with 20th Century Fox for “Fight Club: The Musical” (I kid you not) — Palahniuk is set to become one of the most well-known authors of the new century. Even the London Ballet Company has gotten in on the action with a “Fight Club” ballet. What’s next — “Fight Club: The Candy Bar”?

The author himself is rather nonchalant about his multi-media appeal: “I don’t know whether it’s the style — it’s such a cinematic style, based on visual images and really specific, concrete, limited scenes — or whether it is the sort of extreme nature of the stories, because those are really appealing and challenging to young filmmakers,” he says. “I think filmmakers are really tired of seeing stories and screenplays that are written to become movies. They look too commercial and flat, so I think they’re really attracted to the edginess that books can have, because books are so cheap to produce, even compared to television movies.”

Currently on tour to support the paperback release of his last publication, “Diary,” Palahniuk has forged his career on shock and atrocity, underwritten by a wit that somehow makes it all palatable. “A big part of it,” he says, “is right now books have such a small, small audience that you can’t even call them a mass medium any more. And because of this tiny audience and the real consensual nature of reading, that this person has agreed to sit down and spend the time and make the effort to read this book — it’s not like TV or broadcast where innocent people can be subjected to it — [authors] have more freedom to approach these topics than they’ve ever had in history.

“And nobody burns books anymore because nobody gives a rat’s ass about books anymore,” he continues, “so I think books should really take advantage of that freedom. It won’t be around forever.”

Social musings aside, you still have to wonder how much of his approach is simply designed to amuse himself; as he admits, “I always think that unless there’s something in the book that I’m personally offended by and I think I’ve gone too far, then I haven’t gone far enough.”

The current tour has him reading from his next novel, which he describes as along the lines of “Canterbury Tales” meets Edgar Allen Poe. The 450-page book, due to be released next spring, features a series of ghost stories interwoven within a larger, over-arching plotline, and apparently contains some scorchers. He claims one of the stories is so disturbing as to be physically affecting: “I’m up there gripping the podium because it freaks me out so much. It’s a really hard story to read, but I think that’s a good sign.”

Such visceral appeal is what makes Palahniuk’s work stick in the brain like taffy on the teeth, but in the end it comes back to those late-night chats that drive his mischevious mind. “I think most writers have a fairly boring life,” he explains, “and the ones who are able to make a career out of it are the ones who are able to identify the great stories around them and really collect those and use them.”

What can one say but “Thank God other people’s lives are more interesting than ours.”

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