Chuck Palahniuk: ‘Transgressive literature in the U.S. ended with 9/11, when we all became terrorists’

There was a time when Chuck Palahniuk, 64, regularly attended all kinds of group therapy sessions. He was just like Marla Singer, one of the characters in his iconic novel, Fight Club (1996) Like her, he pretended to be suffering from whatever the therapy was attempting to treat.

Back then, Palahniuk was working in a truck repair plant. He had studied journalism, but journalism hadn’t made him rich. On the contrary, it didn’t even provide him with enough to live on. So, in the 1990s, his life consisted of a series of bad jobs.

On the side, he attended the creative writing workshop that author Tom Spanbauer held at his home. “Every week, we had to write a story… and I needed ideas,” he recalls.

Today, Palahniuk is a world-renowned author. In 1996, he published Fight Club. And, three years later, the film adaptation was released by David Fincher. It became an instant classic and remains popular today. But despite this, Palahniuk lives a quiet life. He hasn’t been on vacation since 1988. “I like being at home,” he shrugs.

The writer lives in a secluded spot on the outskirts of Portland (the city where he was born), on what’s known as a “residential island.” His house is surrounded by two miles of forest; he has no neighbors. And there’s a beautiful garden on the property, which he loves to tend.

When asked if he has a favorite plant, he replies wistfully: “Geraniums, because they’re always blooming.” He gave an interview to EL PAÍS in Avilés, in northern Spain, where he traveled to participate in Celsius 232, a fantasy, horror and science fiction festival that’s held every summer in mid-July.

Palahniuk can’t stop thinking about how, when he gets home, little Tick – a gray-and-white French bulldog puppy, who is still tiny – “will be huge.” His husband, Mike, is taking care of her.

“Sometimes, I think that writers need to be able to express themselves without speaking to other living beings. I, at least, need it,” he says.

His latest novel, Shock Induction (2024), has just been published in Spain. And on his desk he has a proof copy of his next novel, Galleria, forthcoming in January 2027. “I [proofread] when I travel,” he confesses. Galleria is a tribute to Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer created by Kurt Vonnegut. Trout was the most endearing loser who ever lived.

“I love that character! The idea is that the son of a writer like Kilgore Trout — who wrote a great deal, but published everything in terrible magazines — is trying to reconstruct his father from the stories he wrote. It’s not easy at all, because [the father] used hundreds of pseudonyms, both male and female ones. But, by reading his stories, it’s possible to follow what he was going through at any given moment. And that’s what his 19-year-old son is trying to do,” Palahniuk explains.

The novel, in the author’s words, “is a kind of Martian Chronicles, [the book by Ray Bradbury] made up of short stories with a common thread. It’s also an homage to the format,” he explains. “I didn’t have children. I’ve missed the chance to relive certain moments and mend them. I think that, in a way, my novels do that. They allow me to choose another path. To see myself from the outside. They’re a bit like the children I never had,” he confesses.

His own relationship with his father was complex. It was, in fact, a story of violence, right until the very end. His father, Fred, had seen his own father — Chuck’s grandfather — kill his mother. He was only three years old at the time. And, during the writer’s childhood and part of his adolescence, Fred treated him with contempt. Then, he separated from Chuck’s mother and disappeared.

After the success of Fight Club, Fred reappeared in his life. Father and son had a kind of reconciliation. But soon after, he was murdered by the ex-boyfriend of a woman he had met through a personal ad: Donna Fontaine. The ex-boyfriend — a convicted criminal — had threatened to kill anyone who went out with her… and he did. He killed them both and burned down the house that they were in.

This happened in 1999, the year that Fincher’s film was released. Palahniuk had to decide whether or not he wanted the prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the killer. In the end, he supported it, but the perpetrator was never executed. However, he will never be released from prison. Palahniuk indirectly wrote about all of this in Lullaby (2002), as a way of processing what had happened.

Palahniuk acknowledges that he has a taste for the macabre. Each of his protagonists is always someone who has been expelled from the system and tries to return to it, in a gruesome (and ultimately unsuccessful) fashion. He says that “the media always talks in a black-and-white way – either we’re very bad, or we’re very good – [but] I’m interested in everything in between; everything that we are all the time,” he explains. He also states that “transgressive fiction” – the kind that he, Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho), or Ryan Murphy (with his television anthology American Horror Story) create – “ended after 9/11.”

“After 9/11, my novels were considered to be terrorism. Ryan Murphy hit the nail on the head [with his horror series]. It arrived [in the years following] the financial crisis, when terror began at home… and he locked his characters in that haunted house forever. It was brilliant. Today, horror is the only genre that allows for transgression; it’s the only one that can reflect on what we’re experiencing, while attacking it at the same time,” he reflects.

In his novel Shock Induction, he tells the story of a highly prestigious school experiencing a suicide epidemic. This masks a market where promising students sell themselves to the highest bidder, giving up their dreams in exchange for financial security. “I’ve been obsessed with hypnosis for a while now,” he notes. In fact, during his talk at the Celsius 232 festival, in Avilés, he tried to hypnotize the audience (with some success) by repeating “make a circle, make a gun,” while simultaneously making the gestures.

“It’s odd. Have you noticed the way Donald Trump shakes hands? He always pulls you toward him… and that’s a technique of hypnosis, called ‘shock induction.’ By taking you into his territory, he leaves you defenseless for a moment; in a way, you’re under his control,” the author explains.

Is the world today just pure shock doctrine? “It is, yes,” Palahniuk replies. We’ve let our guard down. And, fortunately, his characters continue to remind us that we have. And they do it in that peculiar way that has so much to do with music. Specifically, with ballads.

“During my childhood and teenage years, songs on the radio were like stories. Like Don McLean’s American Pie. Everything was wonderful back then. I miss the ballads of the 1970s. Why couldn’t prose be written like a song, so we could remember it forever?”

“Today, 30 years after Fight Club was published, there are still people who remind me of ‘the rules.’ Because they were like the refrain of the novel.” He smiles.

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