You know who Chuck Palahniuk is. The novelist and journalist remains perhaps best known as the author of "Fight Club," the bestselling novel that was made into a critically acclaimed cult film in 1999, but Palahniuk has written more than a dozen novels including "Choke," "Diary," "Haunted" and "Invisible Monsters." He has a short story collection, "Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread" which is out in late May. In case you didn't know, he also coined the term “suicide girls.”
His next project is “Fight Club 2.” It’s not a novel, not a film, but a comic book. The ten issue series will be illustrated by Cameron Stewart ("Batgirl," "The Other Side," "Suicide Girls") with covers by David Mack ("Kabuki") and published by Dark Horse Comics. A preview issue of the series is out this Saturday, May 2, on Free Comic Book Day with the first issue of the comic out on May 27. Palahniuk was kind enough to talk with us about where the book came from, the ideas he's been pondering and what readers can look forward to.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did the idea for Fight Club 2 come from? Had you been thinking about this for a while?
CHUCK PALAHNIUK: It’s hard to pin it down to one specific place where the idea came from. I never dreamed that I would have to be talking about the original story for two decades. I spent a lot of last summer in Madrid reading all of Poe and Lovecraft and studying the mythology that Lovecraft created and that Stephen King has created around so much of his work–where he took one story and explored it from all these different angles in subsequent books. I thought, why not create a larger mythology that uses Fight Club as an episode and then expand the story into history into the centuries before that and then into the future and making a mythology instead of just one story.
AD: I’m sure people have asked you for almost two decades if you would write a sequel.
CP: Originally I wouldn’t go there. I said, I would never do this thing. Part of that was because the book and the movie have such a following. I thought that anything that would try to follow the book or the movie would be a disaster. That’s one reason for going with a graphic novel, it gives it a really fresh medium so it can’t be compared directly with either the book or the movie.
AD: Were you a big comics fan?
CP: I was but just the EC horror comics, the ones that were taken off the market because they were considered too corrupting and too upsetting to kids. I loved the gruesome monster comics.
AD: You’ve written a lot of novels and a lot of short stories, was there a steep learning curve writing a comic?
CP: There really was because of the mechanics of a comic. You can’t show anything in action–you have to show it at the starting point of a gesture or the completion point of a gesture. You can’t depict motion. Also the keeping dialogue to a bare, bare minimum. I hate those comics where most of the panel is filled with dialogue balloons so I wanted to keep the dialogue bare bones. Also what they call the page turn reveal. When a reader is looking at two pages, they see kind of everything at once. The only place you can really dazzle or surprise them is when they turn that page. The first thing they see in the upper left hand corner of the upper left hand page is your moment to really dazzle them so pacing everything for that page turn reveal is a real challenge.
AD: Was Cameron Stewart a big help in terms of helping you with that?
CP: In recognizing what a bad comic is. I saw that the worst thing that can happen is repetitive two figures in a panel saying things to one another. Cameron showed me how to break that up and how important it is to keep that visual feel constantly changing so that people are re-engaging with the visuals as well as the dialogue.
AD: Did you write a script or what did you give him?
CP: I wrote a ten issue script, but right from the get go, once I could see how effectively [Cameron] could depict things in visuals–and how little I really actually needed to put in the dialogue–I started to go back and rewrite my script immediately so that I wasn’t stating things that he had much more effectively shown.
AD: People may not remember, but the main character in the book has no name. Besides just naming the character, finding likenesses that aren’t like the movie characters, there are a lot of things that the comic required.
CP: Right and working a lot with Cameron to do that. Mostly because 20th Century Fox owns the copyright to any contributions or changes that they made. They called the character Jack so I couldn’t call the character Jack. It was very small dodges that we had to do.
AD: Rereading Fight Club for this interview, and it has been many years since I read it, I was struck by just how angry it is.
CP: [laughs]
AD: I mean that in a good way, and I think it’s why so many of us responded to it. It also felt like a young man’s book because a lot of that anger is against fathers.
CP: Right. That was another thing I wanted to address ten years down the road. To make Sebastian a father. To make him an even worse father than he remembers his being. That he would have to accept that aspect of his life.
AD: In the book, not giving him name gave a universal feel to those experiences and emotions.
CP: My father thought I was writing about his father so he never took offense. My boss thought I was writing about his boss.
AD: Even though he now has a name, to what degree is revisiting him ten years later a universal tale of getting older and becoming a father.
CP: And also realizing that you are perpetuating something. That you might not even be aware of. It’s building towards the idea that Tyler Durden is a meme, an idea, and that people themselves don’t perpetuate ideas. Ideas bring people together and breed people who act as a vector or carrier to perpetuate the idea. Something that’s revealed part of the way through is that Tyler actually brought Marla and Sebastian together because he needed to breed them to create a new vehicle for himself. It’s their son that he’s after and in turn he will someday breed their son to someone else to create a new vehicle for himself. I just love this idea that ideas are entities that use human beings as a carrier.
AD: That’s an older perspective as well because when we’re younger we would think we created this idea, it couldn’t possibly have existed before us.
CP: Exactly. A theme in the first issue is you can throw away all your possessions, you can burn up your house, but you’ve still got a head full of these second hand jury-rigged not so important not original mass produced thoughts and prejudices and ideologies. How do you get rid of those?
AD: Why did you decide to name him Sebastian?
CP: [laughs] My favorite name that I wanted to give him was Cornelius–because that was one of his big fake names in the support groups–but I used Cornelius in last year’s novel, Beautiful You, and so I was stuck with my second choice, Sebastian.
AD: You have a short story collection coming out at the end of May, Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, which has a Tyler Durden story.
CP: Right called “Expedition.”
AD: What else is included in the book?
CP: For the most part it’s stories that I wrote specifically for book tours over the years. I would write one new really strong story that I could read as a fresh, exclusive thing for people to get when they came to the events. A lot of those stories went into Playboy and then it’s longer things that are written in a more traditional third person style. For the most part they’re stories about humans and animals interacting.
AD: What interested you in that theme again and again?
CP: I read this Lewis Hyde book, Trickster Makes This World. So much of it was about these trickster characters like Coyote. I fell in love with the idea of how if you name a character after an animal, it lends this kind of mythic unreality and power to the story. Even if it’s a suburban John Cheever story, if you place Coyote in that setting, it becomes this hybrid of white person mythology and Native American mythology and I just really fell in love with that strange new hybrid.
AD: I can see that being appealing. You approach so much of your work by trying to craft hybrid forms.
CP: It makes it more fresh so you’re not just seeing this hyper-realistic Cheever guy going to work story or this hyper realistic Raymond Carver dirty realist story where everything is so in the world. It gives it a little bit of a little sense of unreality that I think allows the reader to read even more upsetting events. There’s a tiny assurance that it’s not real. That’s one reason for going with Cameron Stewart [for the comic]. People criticized his work for being “too cartoony” but I like that because it gives the reader just a little bit of an out.
AD: You went into this not wanting that hyper realistic style that you find in EC comics.
CP: I think you might as well make a movie. If you’re going to make it that literal, then it’s going to burn people out. Upsetting stuff shown too realistically exhausts people and they leave the story.
AD: As far as writing a sequel, did you worry about it or did you approach it the same as any story?
CP: I really approach it the way I approach any story. If anything with a sequel there’s a lot of conventions that can be picked up. Like the support groups. That was really easy to pick right back up. The human sacrifices, where people agree to give their life to become what they really want to become–a doctor or a veterinarian–that was a convention that was very easy to pick up. The big Project Mayhem house full of wayward guys. That was a convention that was fairly easy to pick up. And then to use those as a springboard to create new conventions. In a way it was easier than writing a fully original book.
AD: You had to take these parts and assemble them differently.
CP: And make them work towards a different goal. The sequel starts from those places and takes them to new places.
AD: When people hear Fight Club 2, they’re going to have an expectation. Do you engage with that? Do you think about what people expect and then either meet it or subvert it? Or both?
CP: Initially I didn’t. I just thought, screw it, it’s going to be what I want. I had written it and then I was at Comic Con in Seattle a month or two months ago and I was at a panel. Several people got up to ask questions and they all asked, is this character coming back? Is this character coming back? I had never thought about bringing back these secondary characters. I realized that there was this big hope that people like Big Bob might not have died. Or that Angelface would come back. Part of my ongoing rewrite is to bring back these characters that I didn’t realize people had bonded with so strongly.
AD: You’re just fitting them into the story and framework that’s already there.
CP: Exactly. I didn’t realize how emotionally invested people were in so many previous elements. They don’t want something that’s entirely fully new. They want a really strong link back to what they already know.
AD: You made the original announcement about Fight Club 2 at San Diego Comic-Con, and joked afterwards that you hadn’t meant to.
CP: [laughs] Right. I probably shouldn’t have said it in a room full of people with social media devices.
AD: If you’re trying to keep something quiet, saying it within a mile of the San Diego Comic-Con is not the place to do it.
CP: In a way it was kind of perfect because it really put a gun to my head. I had to do something. I couldn’t just talk about it in secret with my friends.
AD: You’d been thinking and talking seriously about this for a while?
CP: I had. I have a friend here in Portland, Chelsea Cain, who writes mysteries. Chelsea had invited me to all these parties where she had comic writers and artists and editors, and they seemed like such pleasant fun people. Collaborating with them was something that was appealing from the first time I met them.
AD: Did you meet Cameron Stewart or David Mack there?
CP: I’ve known David for over ten years. He wrote to me a long long time ago and I sent him a package full of surprises and we had started a correspondence. When he was in Portland we would always get together and have coffee. Once I announced the book, I was being coached by Matt Fraction, who writes the Sex Criminals series, and his wife Kelly Sue DeConnick. Scott Allie, the Editor in Chief at Dark Horse, is a good friend of Chelsea’s and Scott was really courting me through Chelsea. I thought if I was going to learn this thing, I should learn it from somebody nearby and Dark Horse is in the Portland area so it was a good fit.
AD: Having spent all this time, is it invigorating to think about a new novel and doing something different?
CP: You know just learning to write within this new form has been exciting enough. Just trying to make sense of the effect of a new form. At this point I’m going to be co-writing the screenplay for the movie to be made from my book Lullaby. I’m only doing that because I think I’ll be a much better screenwriter now that I’ve done this comic scripting.
AD: Have you collaborated much before this?
CP: No not at all. That’s the loneliness of being a novelist. You might present your work at a workshop once a week but it’s not a collaborative process. You might take edits from your editor at the end of the process, but beyond that, you do the vast amount of the work in complete isolation.
AD: Do you have an idea for what’s next?
CP: [laughs] I do not. I’m not thinking that far down the road.
AD: Well, I’m very excited to see where you’re going with the series.
CP: I hope that something shocks and offends you.
AD: I hope so, too!
For information about Free Comic Book Day - including where to go to find those free comics, go to: www.freecomicbookday.com
