Chuck Palahniuk - Haunted
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Chuck Palahniuk has been a major focal point of SuicideGirls and members since the beginning. Since his debut novel, Fight Club, was turned into a movie in 1999 Palahniuk has becomes a major literary force. His new book, Haunted, is a series of short stories connected by the idea of a writer’s retreat. My favorite story is Guts about a horny 13 year old, a swimming pool’s intake valve and the taste of calamari.

Check out the official site for Haunted

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to?

Chuck Palahniuk: Not much. I’m just coming back from picking up my day’s food.

DRE: Are you going on tour soon?

CP: I just finished a US tour and I start the Canadian tour this weekend.

DRE: So Haunted is a crazy book and I totally forgot that Guts was in it. Guts is a really gross story.

CP: Yeah but a funny one.

DRE: It’s very funny because I can see that happening to me which is the sad thing.

CP: I think that’s why people relate to it. Everybody’s got sort of a horrific sex story like that.

DRE: Guts was the one that was making people pass out at readings. Would you read the whole story at the readings?

CP: Oh yeah but typically I’d have to stop halfway through when the people were being lowered to the floor. Everyone was all upset about these people passing out. Then I’d finish the story.

DRE: I was reading it in an airport and it made me kind of reel. It must have been a lot of fun to write that story.

CP: It was fun, but the whole time I thought I can never read this. I will never be able to read this thing out loud. People are going to be picturing me doing all this shit.

DRE: I didn’t picture you actually. I pictured a short blonde kid for some reason. I don’t know why.

CP: Oh good.

DRE: Because he’s got a pool. I see everyone with a pool as a blonde. I don’t know why. I never had a pool.

CP: That’s really weird, because the guy who told me the story, the guy that it happened to is blonde.

DRE: Oh really?

So that happened to somebody? Wait, of course it happened to somebody. Everything happens to somebody.

CP: Right but many of them are just stories that people have told me. Now people have told me stories that make those stories look like nothing.

DRE: But you love that!

CP: Oh my gosh, that’s where I get my work, that’s why I can do almost a book a year.

DRE: I also really liked the short, Swan Song. The one about the reporter who discovers an ex-child star who lives in his town. It is an upsetting story because once again I could see myself, not doing that exactly because I could never kill anybody, but I could see a reporter doing that. Did you hear that kind of story from someone too?

CP: It’s also based on how many child celebrities do end up dead and how they’re even bigger news once they’re dead. Nobody would actually fess up about killing them.

DRE: A lot of people want to become famous by killing someone else that’s famous.

CP: That’s a real way of establishing your power up front.

DRE: You also have the story, in Haunted, about the talk shows. I saw you on Conan O’Brian.

CP: I just did the Craig Ferguson Show, which was a blast.

DRE: How was that?

CP: It was great and we were funny. He actually talked to me beforehand which Conan O’Brien did not do. Suddenly I’m confronted by this giant pink Conan O’Brien covered in makeup. I have no idea what to say with this huge mannequin. Ferguson was way more relaxed and just a lot of fun to do.

DRE: Did you happen to watch those just to see how you did?

CP: No. This is the same reason why I don’t want to be in the movies that are getting made from my books because that would just ruin them for me.


DRE: Did you write the short stories for anthologies or anything like that and then connect them for the book?

CP: I had two separate books I was going to do. I was going to do a novella that was about these people in this sort of fairy tale setting gradually destroying themselves. They were all going to be book and movie and music critics who were so sick of what they were being forced to review that they were going to get away from the world and were going to incubate their own sort of uber-culture. But once they got sort of squirreled away, they realized that they couldn’t even produce stuff as good as what they were trashing and they didn’t have a creative bone in their body. All they could do was tear stuff apart. So they started tearing themselves apart to make a story.

Then the stories themselves were going to be just a collection. Then the publishing house talked me into sort of putting them together and making a sort of bizarre novel out of it.

DRE: Was the process of taking two things and putting them together new for you?

CP: It was different but what the hell, I’m not in this to be bored.

DRE: Did you ever do a writer’s retreat?

CP: I haven’t. I did things like that in a workshop. We would all go someplace for the weekend, layout 18 people, and just drink and present our work and have a great time. But it has never been a real sort of a retreat from life. I just never had the money or the time for something like that.

DRE: What about something like the Mary Shelley thing where people sit around and try to freak each other out?

CP: You know, that’s sort of like every time I get together with my friends. We all really compete for best story, most attention, and most extreme place to take a story. We all do that.

DRE: You tell true stories or are you just making them up?

CP: No, we tell true stories.

DRE: You tell true stories.

CP: You cannot make up anything better than the truth.

DRE: How’s the response to this book been? It’s little spurts of Chuck Palahniuk rather than one whole novel.

CP: Right but it also goes on over twice the length of Fight Club. I just figured that the only way I could have the kind of momentum ongoing that I wanted was to do it with short stories. If I was going to have 400, then we had to have some sort of horrific thing every seven to eight pages.

DRE: Had you ever written short stories before?

CP: I had but they always became chapters in books. The way I start every book is to write the key plot points as a short story so each one stands by itself.

DRE: Since some of the stories were stories that others had told you. How did they become personal to you?

CP: Over the course of 20 years, people would tell me different stories and I would start to notice commonalities. I had the carrot story, I got the wax story, and I’ve got the swimming pool story. So I figured I’ve got three stories, this could be a three act story. I just find ways of sort of quilting together things based on similar themes. I think my greatest skill is to find some way to put together these small things based on common elements and anxieties people have.

DRE: Which cities are you excited to hit for this book? Is it the bigger cities, is it the smaller places where people travel all over?

CP: It’s sort of mixed. Berkeley is a fantastic place to read. People really get into it. Chicago is a great place to read. Austin, Texas is insane. They give people beer at the book events. So it’s interacting with 800 drunk Texans.

DRE: What about Europe?

CP: London is always a great city. Bologna, Italy is a college town with a lot of sort of overseas programs headquartered there, so there’s a gigantic crowd there.

DRE: Recently you’ve been lending your name to help people like Craig Clevenger, how did Craig’s book get to you?

CP: Actually, somebody on the Cult website recommended it to me so I went out and bought a copy. It’s a great book. It’s really easy to promote things that you like.

DRE: Are people sending you a lot more books now, for either a quote or just to get impressions?

CP: Boy, I get tons of books, mostly through publishing media people. For most of them I don’t know why they send them to me because I have no interest whatsoever. The back of my toilet is just a mountain of books right now.

DRE: What did you think about the documentary that [ChuckPalahniuk.net creator] Dennis [Widmyer] put together?

CP: I haven’t watched it and I probably never will.

DRE: Too much about yourself, right?

CP: Yeah, can you imagine anything more painful?

DRE: You gave Dennis some notes on his screenplay as well.

CP: Yes and he better take them to heart.

DRE: You were kind of forced to come out of the closet.

CP: I was heavily coached too. I figured if anybody’s going to make a story out of this I should.

DRE: So you weren’t planning on it beforehand?

CP: I don’t even want my picture in the goddamn books. I would really like it to sort of fade away and just let the book present itself. But you can’t really do that anymore, that’s just not publishing. So I just make the best of it.

DRE: Has it changed anything?

CP: No nothing’s changed.

DRE: I guess you weren’t expecting anything in the tabloids.

CP: Writers that sick are such bottom feeders. They are so low on the celebrity food chain. That’s never going to be in the paper.

DRE: So what’s going on with the movies? I heard Survivor might be back on track?

CP: The writer director team that made Constantine just bought Survivor. They bought it in February and they’ve announced that it’s going to be one of if not their very next project. It’s actually going to happen, maybe.

DRE: Have you met with the director, Francis Lawrence?

CP: I don’t even know their names. This is how little attention I pay. I didn’t meet with them. Their agents talked to my agents and they did the deal and I signed the papers and they signed the papers. Now it’s in their hands.

DRE: Did you go check out the Constantine movie just to see if they knew what they were doing?

CP: It’s funny. I’m waiting for the DVD because my friends went and they really liked it. They liked it better than Sin City. Once the DVD is out I’ll see it.

DRE: What else is being made into movies?

CP: Diary is, they’re so happy with the screenplay that they’re now negotiating for Lullaby, which is the only one of my books that is not optioned. The screenplay for Choke is done so now they’re casting it; they want to be shooting no later than December this year.

DRE: Who’s directing Choke?

CP: I think it’s going to be a man named Clark Gregg, who’s been a very successful screenwriter up to this.

DRE: He’s the guy who works with David Mamet a lot.

CP: I don’t know anything about these people. I just know their names. I know he wrote What Lies Beneath. He’s in a TV series this summer and I can’t even tell you the name of the series.

DRE: Is Jim Uhls involved with any of these movies?

CP: No, I haven’t touched base with Jim in, boy at least a year.

DRE: I remember you guys were trying to develop something for HBO.

CP: Yeah but it wasn’t going in any direction I wanted to go in. So what the hell, we stuck a pin in it.

DRE: I read on the IMDB about a new version of Fight Club to be directed by Vikram Chopra.

CP: I have no idea what you’re talking about. So far I’ve negotiated about doing a Fight Club ballet, which was to be produced in London. That’s not on track anymore. Then there was the Fight Club Broadway musical.

DRE: How’s that going?

CP: I haven’t heard anything in a year on that, so that’s not a good sign.

DRE: I bet you don’t play video games, but did you see anything from the Fight Club game?

CP: No, but hundreds, maybe thousands of people have told me that it sucks.

DRE: I never heard much about it, so I assumed it did.

CP: Fox gets the merchandizing royalties on it so I can bad mouth it all I want.

DRE: What’s the next book you’re working on?

CP: It is sort of a dysfunctional science fiction novel based on American car culture. There hasn’t been a great car novel since maybe Christine and that was a long time ago. So I think that we just really need a good car culture novel.

DRE: Did you ever write the screenplay you talked about a few years ago?

CP: I wrote one based on the short story Ambition about the artist who sticks his paintings up in museums and then ends up getting hired to kill famous artists and becomes famous himself. I finally gave up and wrote a short story out of it and put it in Haunted. I wrote a play and we did a reading in Los Angeles that was just horrifically dark and it needs a whole bunch of work before it’s ever going to be seen by people. It just needs more work on the second half before I can show it to anybody.

DRE: What do you think about the rise of SuicideGirls?

CP: I see a lot of SuicideGirls at my events. It just seems like you can always pick them out in the crowd. They’re always so extreme and then they come up and say ‘Hey we’re SuicideGirls.’

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Chuck+Palahniuk+-+Haunted/