The Curious Case of Chuck Palahniuk

In light of his new book, Not Forever, But For Now

Chuck Palahniuk recently appeared on Soft White Underbelly. I subscribe to that channel, and YouTube promptly served me the interview. I hadn’t checked out anything of Chuck’s in a few years, so I tuned in to see what he had to say. Soft White Underbelly is a fascinating talk show for the low-bottom crowd, an equal and opposite platform from the standard broadcast talk show—to really explain this channel requires an entire post. Until now, I think the most culturally famous person they’ve interviewed is GG Allin’s brother, Merle. So I had to check this out.

Chuck Palahniuk, screengrabbed from YouTube.

Chuck is, as always, a charming and well-spoken interviewee. The interview is wonderfully paced and shot, and one of the best on the channel. It’s definitely worth watching.

But it led me to the questions I’ve had about Chuck for over 20 years: how much of his whole persona is bullshit? None, all, or a percentage in-between? Is this really who he is or is this a created long con a step removed from JT LeRoy?

TLDR:

Before I go further, here’s my scorecard: his first three novels are brilliant, perfect statements about American society and culture of their time. After that, the books slide into entertainment, each one getting worse until they slide into the wet muck that are the Fight Club sequels. I read his new one—Not Forever, But for Now—it’s okay, much better than anything else post-Diary. But if you haven’t read any of them, read the first three, then the second three, then skip the rest.

How Do We Judge a Writer?

Should we judge a writer by their best work or their worst? Every writer has written a stinker or two, right? Chuck’s range, however, is mind-bending: from one of our country’s most insightful and brilliant takes on superficial beauty in Invisible Monsters to the unreadable Snuff. How can this be the same writer?

Is it possible that Chuck is writing horrible books on purpose, each one worse than the last, to see where his readership breaks? Is this some kind of weird anti-literary device that goes beyond anything Andy Kaufman did with comedy¹? Imagine if Andrew Dice Clay had kept releasing volumes of The Day the Laughter Died². What if this is all an experiment to see if his fans’ loyalty supersedes their taste? If it were any other writer, I wouldn’t think it was possible.

Parallel Thought

In 1995, my first book, King of the Roadkills, was released. I was a bit of a Gen X darling at the time, and three other presses expressed interest in my next book if it were a novel. So I went to work on a book about a cult that sells soap rendered from human fat, which was a metaphor built on my own cult experience from the ‘80s. There was also a lot of streetfighting in the book, a direct retelling of my own teen years in the aforementioned cult. I spent the rest of that year and part of the next hammering that out, and everyone who had said they wanted the book had been fired, quit, or gone out of business by that time.

“Dude, did you publish your novel under a different name?” Marty³ asked over the phone. He was an employee of Powell’s in Portland, a voracious reader and a friend of mine from the poetry circuit.

“What?” I replied. Crazy talk! “No, why do you ask?”

Marty described Fight Club to me. I felt like throwing up. There’s no way he could have seen my manuscript. More likely, he had finished his before I had started mine. But definitely my manuscript was dead because of it⁴. This was a case of “parallel thought” in which two people have the same idea independent of each other.

But when I did read Fight Club, I loved it and it was a much better book than I had written. There wasn’t anything to be bitter over. It’s like when I used to play basketball, and someone who was taller, stronger, and more agile than me beat me. You only feel bad when someone who sucks beats you. So I became a fan.

Chuck’s Closet

It was either the Choke or Lullaby tour, at Stacey’s Bookstore⁵ in San Francisco’s Financial District, in which I saw a weird side of him that I hadn’t seen. The room was crowded, like readings rarely got save for the likes of David Sedaris or Sherman Alexie. A whole crowd of Chuckheads⁶, waiting for our annual fix, everyone loaded for the Q&A.

Someone asked where he thought he fit in the literary canon of gay writers.

“I’m not gay,” he said, repeating it insistently.

Fight Club is an intensely gay book. The Tylers meet on a nude beach and are naked in the house the whole time. One of them is living a heterosexual lie by sleeping with Marla and the other hates him(self) for it. The straight men in the book love each other but culturally cannot admit it. It’s a secret everyone knows but the one rule is they never talk about it.

And his other books, Invisible Monsters, is gay as the book is long and Survivor is one long confession about who he really is. We pretty much all thought that like many gay men of our generation, he grew up in the closet and didn’t come out until well after he was living on his own. Not one person in the room thought he was straight and no one imagined that he could be in the closet still.

But he was. It made the room uncomfortable. It was the first time that I saw that Chuck may not be who he said he was, that he was willing to forego the truth to tell the story how he wanted.

Years later, he angrily came out. Here’s a paragraph from this article that I’ll just repost here:

In September 2003, as he was about to embark on a tour, Palahniuk gave an interview to Karen Valby of Entertainment Weekly magazine. Just before publication, he became persuaded that she planned to publish statements he'd made in confidence, and "out" him. In an attempt to beat her to the punch, Palahniuk posted an angry voice diary entry on The Cult website. In it, he announced the true gender of his spouse, and made highly personal allegations relating to the interviewer and a member of her family.

Performance Art, Pranks, and Guts

[Edit: a reader,

Brian Martinez

, helpfully sent me a link with this interview with John Law who I would consider to be the “mouth-of-the-river” source for all things related to The Cacophony Society. if he said CP was a member, then, yep, I’ll take it as truth. Must’ve had bad information from other bad Santas—maybe they were fakes? or posers. Whatever—I was factually incorrect.

See? I’m reasonable. If you have real info like this, please send it along.

I’m leaving my erroneous text to follow with strikethroughs, as a record. You’ll see in there that I didn’t state it as fact but anecdotal evidence. The rest of the paragraph remains. I still question whether the pass-outs were staged or real]

Chuck has long bragged about the exploits of The Cacophony Society, a group that conducts performance art and pranks. They’re the real deal, for sure. But I’ve never met one of them who said he had been a member; I know this is anecdotal from the mouths of the SF-based members, but it adds to my overall curiosity—is Chuck telling the truth or retelling the stories of others? But the point is, he at least is in love with the idea of pranking others.

Which brings up “Guts”—the story so disgusting that people passed out at readings of it. Or did they?

I went to the first reading of “Guts” in San Francisco, which I believe was actually for the release of the book Diary. The story later appeared in the book Haunted. By now, the cult of Chuck had swelled, and this event took place off-site, as the bookstore (The Booksmith, IIRC) couldn’t hold us all. We crammed ourselves in, standing room only, to the basement of a church set up like a 12-step meeting and waited to see What Chuck Would Do This Time.

At the peak of this gross story, a woman in the front row passed out, and the reading stopped so she could be attended to. The story involves a man who must bite through his prolapsed lower intestine which is stuck in a pool drain in order to save his own life; if there were a story to pass out to, this would be the one, in the room that was really hot with nerd bodies and sucked of quality oxygen.

Man, did we have a fun time with that one on the message board⁷ for the next few days! Everyone gave an account.

And then at the next stop, it happened again! and then again at the next stop. Wait, that happened at the next stop. Again, and again, one woman in the front row passed out. Then the conspiracy started, which lit up the message boards even longer.

The filmmaker Bill Castle⁸ used to hire young women to scream at his horror movies. He swore it turned a dull stinker of a film into a horrorfest, and created an atmosphere of terror. Had Chuck done the same?

Haunted: Horrible Book or Just a Scam?

Chuck then took a bunch of uncollected short stories that had run in places like Playboy, weaved a flimsy narrative around them all that they were all stories from the same writers’ workshop, and published it as a novel. Why? You get paid more for a novel than you do a book of short stories.

But we got the short stories we wanted as fans. They were all written in the Chuck narrative voice we wanted to experience, but it was a little off-putting that the conceit was that they were all written by different characters, when we knew otherwise. The glue that brought them together just wasn’t as strong as his other ideas.

This is the book in which I think he stopped caring about whether or not the books were good. He wants that “mailbox money.” No matter what he writes, someone will buy the film and TV rights, and a certain number of books will sell.

The New Fight Club Intro

When Haunted came out, I got it the first day and read it that night. However, when I went to the signing which was over a week later, I was told I couldn’t get it signed unless I bought a copy at the bookstore⁹ where the signing was held. I literally did not have the money to buy another copy, so I bought a cheaper Fight Club paperback instead, which got me in the line. There was a new introduction, which I unfortunately read in line.

Chuck spent the intro railing against the publishing industry. In it, his main gripe is that he only got $5000 for Fight Club, and called it “kiss-off” money. The intro boils down into “It’s all about the money.” By the way, this is more than what a lot of publishers pay a first-time novelist. Chuck is a privileged, spoiled writer when it comes to payday. He hit the lottery, not only selling the film rights, but that it actually came out, and was actually an amazing cultish film that got more popular after it left theaters. He doesn’t acknowledge, perhaps from his own ignorance, how fortunate he was. Instead, he’s bitter that his initial paycheck did not live up to his own vision of himself.

By the time I got up to the front of the line, I wasn’t sure if I should go through with it. I thought about bailing out. I was working full-time, going to school part-time, on track to graduate at 35 years old, and struggling, to say the least. $5000 would have been life-changing for me. The most I had gotten for a book by then was $1000, which paid for a semester at SF State. I was no longer Gen X darling, as I had been, and everyone in publishing either wanted a writer who was younger or older with a solid track record. Chuck’s essay reminded me of the cult leaders I had who punished me for not recruiting richer people…in the end, it’s always about the money.

The Slide

Then came Rant, written as an oral history. The only time I’ve seen this work in fiction is World War Z. Rant was the first book of his that read like it was one draft. I gave up on this one.

Snuff is about a gang bang. I can’t find confirmation online, but the font and spacing is like when you’re trying to get a longer term paper and are fucking with the layout. I am curious as to the word count. I didn’t get started. This is where I gave up.

Pygmy is about an exchange student who is part of the large-scale Operation Havoc to take down the US. The Damned takes place in hell where the telemarketers call the living. The Doomed is its sequel, and it really looks like the cover art is made out of semen. Ugh.

SERIOUSLY, CHUCK, ARE YOU FUCKING WITH US?

Is this the best you can do, or are you purposefully writing horrible shit just to see how long we’ll hold out? Is this a prank on publishing or on readers? Or did you honestly write your best ideas already and your brain is rotten?

Back to Soft White Underbelly

So I’m watching the Soft White Underbelly interview, and most of the questions are answered in long conversational essays. Either:

• Chuck has been asked the same questions so many times, he’s memorized lengthy, thought-out answers.

• These are rehearsed lies he has constructed like his fictions for the suckers.

There are stories like the grease gun/donut story, in which he fills a jelly donut with axle grease and waits for someone to bite into it. I doubt this ever happened, but if it did, it happened once, and he makes it sound like a weekly occurrence at the ol’ Freightliner.

In the afterword of the new book, he recounts that people regularly get their books signed for someone else, and it’s always the case that the person is dead and they’re going to be buried with the book. Maybe this happened. But it’s not common. It is very common that people get books signed for other people, but they’re gifts.

There’s just so much PT Barnum in this guy that I don’t believe him. Usually I agree, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, but maybe my gripe is that the stories aren’t good anymore. Fight Club was a great story. We wanted to believe it. People swore they knew of one in their area. We wanted to believe that people were fainting at a story they heard.

After all this, I’m still somewhat fascinated with the guy, so I guess he wins. I spent my Sunday morning reading his newest book. I doubt he’s read mine.

1. There was a famous show when instead of doing the comedy act, he read the entire book of The Great Gatsby, to see when people would give up and walk out.

2. When he was sick of the character, which it was, Clay recorded and released an album of a performance that was so bad, he would never have to do it again. He ultimately went back to the character, but that’s another story for another time.

3. Marty, over the years, told many people the story of how I stopped a guy from hitting him with a beer bottle. I have no memory of that. It was par for the course where I worked.

4. The novel sucked. It was a mercy killing. I still have a copy but I should destroy it in case I die and someone tries to put it out.

5. One of the few clean places in that neighborhood where you could take a shit without buying something. RIP Stacey’s!

6. I don’t think anyone but me used that term.

7. Ask your grandfather what the internet used to be like.

8. There’s a great autobio of him that is called Step Right Up, I’m Going to Scare the Pants Off America.

9. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books. One of the snottiest bookstores in SF. Good Riddance.