Chuck Palahniuk: Playboy Interview

Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most popular, outrageous, shocking and scarily talented contemporary American writers, a gross-out-thriller author extraordinaire, according to The New York Observer, and, says The Washington Post, one of the most feverish imaginations in American letters. He has been compared to Jonathan Swift and Kurt Vonnegut, and his dozen books have sold a total of 4 million copies. Author of such mega–sensations as Fight Club and Choke, Palahniuk has a zealously devoted cult following and, increasingly, a mainstream one as well. People magazine wrote, "Among sick puppies, Palahniuk is top dog." It was meant as the highest praise.

Pygmy, Palahniuk's latest novel, is typically inventive, hilarious, moving and deeply disturbing. Written from the perspective of a killer disguised as a foreign-exchange student and bent on the destruction of America, the book is replete with severed body parts and spewing bodily fluids, contains a grotesque rape and is a vicious, comical satire of everything from Christianity (the bogus faith of a false prophet) to education (calibrated to degrade all dignity) to the sexual peccadilloes of the rich and famous.

Fight Club remains Palahniuk's signature work, having been made into a movie by director David Fincher, starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, charismatic and terrifying, compelling and sadistic, has his own following of fans who celebrate (and sometimes emulate) his antics, which are designed to instill mayhem and express disgust with the status quo. Durden, working as a waiter in the movie, farted on the meringue, sneezed on braised endive and, as for the cream of mushroom soup, well. Like Durden, fans of the book have founded real fight clubs where men come to beat the hell out of one another.

Along with his books and the movies based on them (Choke, starring Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston, was released last year), Palahniuk is also known for his packed book-tour events that are part reading and part performance art. Touring for the 2008 book Snuff, about a porn star aiming to set the world gang-bang record (her goal is 600 "fornications" in a day), Palahniuk tossed inflatable sex dolls into the audience. Other events have elicited dramatic reactions from some audience members; at readings of Palahniuk's short story "Guts," originally published in Playboy, more than 200 people have fainted.

Palahniuk's own background story reads like one of his more horror-filled novels. Born in 1962 in Pasco, Washington, Palahniuk has said he had "a regular, tense American childhood." The truth is it was tenser than many. When he was five, his father came close to severing one of Chuck's fingers with an ax, on purpose. His parents divorced when he was 13. Later Chuck was let in on a family secret: As a child, his father had hidden under a bed and watched his father, Chuck's grandfather, murder Chuck's grandmother and then shoot himself. Calamity and terror continued when, in 1999, Palahniuk's father and his girlfriend were shot to death by her ex-husband.

Palahniuk graduated from the University of Oregon and has worked as a diesel mechanic and journalist. In his mid-30s he began to attend writing workshops run by novelist Tom Spanbauer, a renowned Portland, Oregon writer. Spanbauer's concept of "dangerous writing" inspired Palahniuk's close-to-the-bone subject matter.

Upon the publication of Pygmy, Playboy sent contributing editor David Sheff to meet Palahniuk in Portland, where the author lives. "Palahniuk was correct when he said people expect Tyler Durden or Charles Manson when they first meet him," Sheff says. "I did. But he's far from either. Instead, he's soft-spoken, gentle and extremely thoughtful. He's also a captivating storyteller. He has you hysterically laughing, and then his stories, much like his books, take a sharp turn, often to the macabre or heartbreaking or both."