Shock and Awww

We live in a brutal world. Violent, degrading and tragic events disturb everyday existence, just as they have since the dawn of time. Or as novelist Chuck Palahniuk puts it, “Crap has always happened, crap is happening and crap will continue to happen.”

The Fight Club author has never shied away from the crap—in fact, he appears at times to revel in it, graphically depicting sex and violence with nary an ounce of glamour. His latest novel, Snuff, follows a porn star trying to set a record by filming sex acts with 600 different men. But the end goal, Palahniuk says, is not just to shock. He’s interested in the response to the shock—both from the reader and the characters in the story: “The core of romantic fatalism is that in the face of all the crap that just happened we have the freedom to make good things happen, and not just be stunned by the bad things. That’s the central drive.”

Even with his horror tales, he claims, the shock value has a higher purpose. “It’s a cathartic sort of exhausting,” he says. “It’s the reason I go to the gym every night, so that generalized stress is forced to crisis and exhausted in that way. And I think horror stories have always been our way of dealing with social issues that we can’t address directly because we’d just fight resolution. Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman’s right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of Rosemary’s Baby, or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to Stepford Wives.”

His 2001 novel Choke has a sex addict as its main character, but the tone of the new film adaptation starring Sam Rockwell is surprisingly sweet. As with Fight Club, the story idea stemmed from Palahniuk’s time volunteering as a driver for hospice patients. “I started to recognize that, in a way, 12-step groups, recovery groups, support groups were becoming the new kind of church for our time,” he says. “A place where people will go and confess the very worst aspects of their lives, and seek redemption and community.” But where the narrator of Fight Club visits support groups as a tourist, feigning cancer to cry with victims, the protagonist of Choke does the opposite; he’s a sex addict, but he’s unwilling to participate in the therapy, instead using them for sexual dalliance. He’s a damaged individual—and for Palahniuk, that’s the only kind of character worth writing about.

Read the full transcript of Paste's interview with Chuck Palahniuk.