missy

Chuck Palahniuk is now a best selling author. I never thought those words would ever come together in that way. But with the release of the David Fincher film Fight Club based on Chuck's novel, it was inevitable. It happened with his last dark novel Choke.

The new book Lullaby is the first of his reinventions of horror. In Lullaby, Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or "culling song". This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle; who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before; for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail.

While his books may often have outrageous and dark elements in them, his life hasn't been much different. In 1999, his own father was murdered, spinning Chuck into a nightmarish legal process in which he would end up being cross-examined by the killer.

Many things in Chuck's books have strangely come to pass in certain ways. After the release of the Fight Club film, illegal fight clubs sprung up around the country. In his novel Survivor there is a terrifying plane crash and it would be tough to forget the images of the buildings collapsing in Fight Club as well. But he tells me himself that he is no seer and it's all done in fun.

Check out the website for Lullaby at: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/lullaby/

Check out Chuck's website for all sorts of cool stuff: ChuckPalahniuk.net

Dan Epstein: I interviewed you last year for Davidfincher.net.

Chuck Palahniuk: I remember. Did you celebrate his birthday in august?

DE: No I didn't know when it was.

CP: Yeah he turned forty. I turned forty in February and Brad Pitt turns forty this year.

DE: You have said Lullaby is the first reinventions of horror that you're writing. What genre is Lullaby?

CP: Witches. We haven't seen a witch story other than say Harry Potter in a long time. It's really about people fantasizing about having power. Children love Harry Potter because it's children with incredible powers. It's the same way they love the X-Men.

DE: Your publishers call you a seer. Hows that feel?

CP: [laughs] Boy marketing people will say anything. People seem to be a little freaked out by the amount of things in my book have come to pass. The thing that people are reeling from now is that it was about a year ago it was deiced to put the picture of the dead bird on the cover of Lullaby. Now dead crows are the first signs of West Nile virus in an area. There has some been backlash. People are saying we're taking advantage of West Nile virus. I wrote this two years ago.

DE: Do you believe in people being able to see the future?

CP: No. I believe that some people are gifted in ways that others aren't, I would be stupid not to say that. I can't see jack shit.

DE: I read that Lullaby was partly inspired by Nine Inch Nails Fixed album. It's an amazing album.

CP: There is one cut on that album that I just played over and over again.

DE: It's a great album to do that with since it never ends that way. I know you and Trent [Reznor] are acquaintances. What did he think of that?

CP: I know he liked the book. I sent the manuscript to him last fall in Los Angeles. He called me and said he was bored and that he wanted to read it.

DE: Wasn't he supposed to do the music for Fight Club?

CP: Yes. He has a connection with Fincher through the music videos but he was really caught in making his album The Fragile.

DE: What elements of Lullaby are autobiographical?

CP: The resentment of noise because when I am writing I like to pretend the rest of the world isn't out there.

DE: Lullaby is part of three-book deal I think.

CP: Sort of three books dedication to reinventing horror.

DE: What book is next?

CP: The next one is done and it's called Period Revival. It's going to be a conspiracy horror book like Ira Levin used to do so well. With Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, he was really the master of conspiracy horror even though he wrote the Barbra Streisand song He Touched Me. At the time he wrote those books it was a really building era of paranoid in our culture. I really think the period conspiracy novel really needs to come back now.

DE: Is there going to be monsters?

CP: No but there will be someone who finds out that they've been manipulated their entire adult life and that she's had control over her life.

DE: Were you surprised when your last book, Choke, became a best seller?

CP: [laughs] Yes I was. I heard my editor was dancing on his desk. I never thought I would see that day. I figured that it was about as likely as it becoming an Oprah book.

DE: Didn't you try to get your editor to steal from Oprah?

CP: My editor, Jerry, was going to a party at her house for Quincy Jones and I was trying to get him to take a souvenir out of her bathroom.

DE: Maybe a vial of fat.

CP: Yeah that little red wagon full of fat she was pulling around for a while. But he wouldn't do it so as revenge I was going on the radio and talking about how he stole her diaphragm and we were going to sell it on ebay. Then I got this really pointed call from Random House saying they got a call from Oprah's company Harpo and that I better just shut up.

DE: It's a good thing she cancelled her book club because then she wouldn't push your books.

CP: Like that would ever happen. It's when you got nothing to risk that you can do things like that.

DE: How has the success of Choke changed things?

CP: Well all of my books are in print and they sell really nicely. As each new book came out it was an increasing success. When someone comes to an event they buy a few of my books. When people bring five books to get signed, it's great.

DE: But then they sell them on ebay.

CP: I cant look at that stuff. You can't look at that and keep any sense of reality. Well I stopped working a regular job in 1998 but it hasn't changed things a hell of a lot. I really committed that if I'm going to be a writer I'm going to work as hard as I would any day job. So if I do that I could do at least one book a year and if I can't do that then I'm not working at it hard enough. It hasn't changed much of anything except the amount of people who come to signings.

DE: What was it like being cross-examined by your father's killer?

CP: It was infuriating. I was so angry. I told myself I was going to be cool about it and I wasn't going to react. Then up there I was slathering like a rabid dog and furious. Thank god the judge stepped in and called it to a halt.

DE: This is real life horror hitting you in the face. Was it the hardest thing you ever did?

CP: No not by any means. It was so sudden. We didn't know until me and the other surviving children went to court that I was going to be called up there. There was no time for it to build up and worry about it. It could have been much worse.

DE: I think you had said a few years ago that you wanted to write a father/son relationship type book.

CP: In a way that was Fight Club. It was so much about the relationship or lack of a relationship between fathers and sons. In a way I felt I bashed fathers so much, that's why I had to do Choke and take a few swings at mothers to even the score. For the time being I probably won't do that.

DE: You spoke to your dad during a sance I read.

CP: I was just writing about that this morning for a British magazine. A friend of mine claims he lives in a haunted house and I wanted to debunk all that. I was house-sitting for him when he was out of town and I asked a friend to bring some psychics over. They held a sance and they told me some stories about stuff that happened between my father and I when I was four years old that I never told anyone. They said my father was really sorry.

DE: I went to an introductory meeting at the Landmark Forum.

CP: Really.

DE: I walked out after about an hour. I couldn't deal with it. I read a little about what you said about it. It felt too culty.

CP: I walked out after 45 minutes. I went to the introduction and told off
the guest speaker. I called her a cult leader, a witch, which I knew what
they were up to and walked out.

DE: What made you go back in?

CP: After I walked out, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I was 26 years old, I've got it all figured out and I'm just going to wait for the rest of my life for something to come along and hurt me. So why not take a chance at being young again. I went back in and apologized. That same night I started Fight Club.

DE: Has 9/11 changed the way you write?

CP: To a certain extent it sort of happened at the perfect time for my career because I did not want to be standing on the soapbox as an angry young man into my forties. This way I get sort of transitioned into my cultural criticisms in a forward way. The best cultural criticism of the 40's and 50's came out of oppressive times. It was fantasy and science fiction and it wasn't taken like form someone on a soapbox. It's my goal to be charming and entertaining in my rants.

DE: I read you take grappling classes.

CP: I did until about a year ago, the guy who taught the classes moved to England. It was a great class. A lot of fun and it was the best exercise ever. I broke two ribs while I was writing Choke. That injury gave the excuse to sit down and write.

DE: Were people excited to grapple with the guy who wrote Fight Club?

CP: At first but that stuff tends to burn off really fast.

DE: How are things going to be different now that youre forty?

CP: I'm a little more family oriented. The books sort of reflect that. They're less about the struggle to find personal identity and more about the struggle with the external world, family and relationship issues.

DE: I read you ate a mink coat at a Pink Floyd laser show. Were you on ecstasy or something?

CP: It was the first time anyone gave me LSD. I was grinding my teeth really bad and one of my friends told me to put something in my mouth. I meant to put my winter muffler in my mouth and after a few minutes I found that I had picked up the sleeve of a mink coat that belonged to the woman next to me. I had chewed this whole sleeve off the elbow. I was choking on the fur and it was the worst thing to find in your mouth when you're high on acid. Hair was in my mouth and in my sinuses. I knew the moment the lights came up this woman was going to freak out and I was going to go to jail. That is a recipe for a bad trip.

DE: You had told me last year that Jake Paltrow [Gwyneth's brother] had written a screenplay based on your book Survivor [which is about the sole passenger of a jet, moments away from slamming first into the Australian outback and then into oblivion]. I am going to assume that project isn't going to happen.

CP: You could win money on that bet.

DE: Anything moving with the Choke movie?

CP: Bandera Entertainment, the guys who did Requiem for a Dream have Clark Gregg [writer of What Lies Beneath] writing a draft. That looks like it will be the next movie.

DE: Do you have any plans to do any screenplays?

CP: David Fincher and I have talked about doing Chemical Pink, which is a dark novel about female bodybuilding. I think Fincher is hemming and hawing about Mission Impossible 3. I know he has the option. I think he got the option and put the deal together with me as the screenwriter. Our agents have talked about it. I tried to tell David that I've never written a screenplay before. He seems fine with it.

DE: I heard you and Jim Uhls [screenwriter of Fight Club] might be doing an HBO series.

CP: We were putting together a concept and a pilot because HBO really wanted to do something and promote it "From the creators of Fight Club". But between David's offer with Chemical Pink and all the books I really had to back away from it.

DE: What would it be about?

CP: The concept was to do a Friends type situational Sex and the City comedy but it would be a lot darker. Each person would have a different compulsion or dysfunction and use their support group the same way the Friends use their coffee house or whatever they do. Do that as dark and upsetting as possible. They wouldn't even be friends they would be failed enemies because they don't want each other to recover. Failed Enablers.

DE: Was it funny to see Jared Leto get beaten in Fincher's Panic Room like he did in Fight Club?

CP: It's funny because Jared Leto is like the new Kevin Bacon. He's in every movie and he gets the crap beaten out of him in American Psycho. I think there is a real desire in life to destroy beautiful things. We want to see these things disempowered.

DE: Here is something you might not know about. 20th Century Fox may not be releasing Fight Club as a special edition DVD anymore.

CP: That would be disappointing, but if all someone wants is the movie? As long as the special edition is somehow available it's fine. The European DVD doesn't have my commentary track on it.

DE: Chuck, thank you so much.