THE HIGH PRIEST OF HARMFUL MATTER

(This is an old article that was originally published by Scottish writer Laura Hird on her excellent, now-defunct site in 2006 or so. I have not changed it; it's a time capsule. I reviewed the shite Chuck Palahniuk novel Haunted on Laura's site before going to see the author on the release tour for the paperback in Skokie, Illinois, which is where this funny story happened. I am no longer married to the woman mentioned in the article. I also no longer read work by the author under discussion here; stopped after Haunted, which this article is about. No authors were harmed - much - during the making of this production.)

Chuck Palahniuk, famous author of ‘Fight Club’, walked across to me at the reading and handed me a plastic long-stemmed rose, signifying that it was my turn to ask him a question. I thought of the joking-but-not-entirely queries I had thought up on the way over: “Have you ever killed anybody?” Or “Do you think, as a Catholic, that Jesus will forgive you for the sociopathic, worthless waste of trees that is ‘Haunted’?” But neither of them really seemed to fit. I wanted to say something humorous, but pointed, to let the man know I basically think he is a disgrace. So I opened my mouth and said:

Wait.

Stop.

Before we go on let’s go back a wee bit here, start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. I first heard of Chuck Palahniuk in 1999 when the movie of ‘Fight Club’ came out. It totally blew me away, as it did many other people. Nihilistic, extremely intelligent, funny, well-acted, heavily quotable…it instantly became one of my favourite films and one I loved getting drunk on Jack Daniel’s to and repeating Tyler Durden’s excellent “Middle Children of History” speech along with Brad Pitt, a heartfelt monologue with which I wholeheartedly agreed.

I started reading Palahniuk’s work at that point too, and have followed him over the last seven years as a reader from book to book; only work of his I have not read is his travelogue, and Diary, which I own a second-hand copy of but have not gotten round to reading yet (and probably never will).

I found his work easily readable but very uneven (often in the same book); it varies from absolutely amazing like ‘Survivor’ to interesting-in-places (some nicely poetic wordriffs or half-chewed soundbite philosophy threaded through the texts, along with interesting bizarre real-life facts) like ‘Lullaby’ to just downright disgusting and worthless like his last and least and latest, ‘Haunted’. And it was the latter work, which, for me, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Permanently.

As any regular reader of this site might be aware, I really did a number on Palahniuk’s last book when I reviewed it. I just couldn’t believe that anybody could write or publish such a poorly written, worthless, damaged, sick waste of paper, and still can’t believe it. I know Palahniuk now has an established audience who will buy anything he puts out, and genuine Cultists (his website is called The Cult) who worship every word that comes out of his fingers or mouth. 

But that still doesn’t explain or excuse, to me, putting out such a botchjob hackwork that is basically an insult to good writing. It’s just a book full of ever-more-graphic-and-gruesome poorly written stories of human pain and misery and torment, and after I finished reading it I was convinced, as I still am, that the author has more than one or two screws loose, and I was glad I only got it out of the local library because buying it would have really stuck in my craw.

Long story short. Fast forward a few months from reading ‘Haunted’ and I heard that Palahniuk was doing a reading at Barnes & Noble bookshop in Skokie, which is only a few minutes’ drive away. This was too good a chance to pass up. I just wanted to go along more out of a sense of sociological interest than anything else: see what he was like in person, see what kind of crowd he drew. And that crowd? I told my wife Ellen that it would be young, comprise crap punks, Slayer fans, Goths and a few assorted weirdos; the usual unusual ‘alternative’ ‘edgy’ literary suspects, in other words. She was slightly skeptical and said we’d see.

And see we did. As we pulled into the car park (or parking lot, as Yanks put it) we saw a green-haired punk with his punkette girlfriend. “There’s the punks,” I smiled, “guaranteed they’re going to the reading.”

Ellen laughed, knowing I was right.

And I was.

We went into the shop and took the escalator down from the first floor into the weirdo-strewn lower level of the place. There was a long queue snaking up from the podium where the author was standing, up some stairs and right along the wall; pretty busy, all in all. We sat down near where Palahniuk was standing signing autographs and I looked across at him, studying him.

Black hair cut short, preppie chic, crisp newly-ironed white shirt blindingly reflecting back the shop lights to the unwary eye, black trousers, easy wide practiced smile for the starstruck probably-never-read-any-other-books-than-Chuck’s fans…in many ways he didn’t look anything much like what I had expected he might, but on another level he looked EXACTLY like I thought he would.

His hair was shorter than I had ever seen in any photo, but his features were recognizable and I found myself shivering slightly for no clear reason. A crazed biker dripping blood and oil and hatred and covered in tattoos would probably have been less disturbing. Ellen and I both independently came to the conclusion that he looked like (as she put it) a “crazed Mormon preacher.” I had to agree with her.

During the signing and reading, the light shining down on him made me weirdly think of the light of the Lord shining down onto the face of some unquestioning True Believer, though I knew I was thinking this because I knew of his lapsed Catholic (if indeed there IS such a thing, which I would tend not to believe) background. The dichotomy between what he wrote and how he presented himself was, I would imagine, somewhat like the one presented by Ted Bundy, the 70s serial killer: plausible, presentable, charming…but a lot of squirming maggot-ridden psychological chaos going on beneath the bland personable plastic façade.

And façade it most definitely was, a professional Teflon image put on purely for the fans, quick sick slick smile and get your photo taken with the Chuck Upchuck, step right up folks, don’t be scared, nothing to fear here but fear itself and the off-kilter sometimes-visible glint in my eyes. Ellen said something very pertinent about his public persona: he is like a carny huckster inviting awed scared people into his circus tents to see all kinds of creeps and freaks (literal and figurative, more on which in a moment) and weirdos, most of them seemingly unaware that they are looking at a contorted reflection of themselves, here to hear stories told to the man by people just like them, their own madness and sickness and damage and stupidity sold back to them for a quick Chuck buck.

Palahniuk signed books for nervous fans for around a half hour as we watched on, posing for photos with a cheapo bloody severed-at-the-forearm prop, pure cheesy showsmanship. “There’s the Slayer fan,” I said to Ellen and pointed to an overweight kid in a tee-shirt by that death metal band. We both chuckled; nice to see the major noir-clad angst-laden archetypes represented in such clichéd three dimensions.

We had seen every one of the groups I had mentioned before going in represented. The crowd was 90% from 15-25 years old, with a few older characters (one of whom looked like Truman Capote to me) there who were harder to classify; probably the ones with their grandmother’s corpse in the basement back home. And us, of course. We don’t have a basement, so you can classify us where you want.

A woman of around 45 or so came and sat next to us a few minutes before the reading started and the crowd got too thick around the writer to move. I engaged the woman in conversation and she told us she’d sat down next to us because we looked more normal than the rest of the crowd. I told her she didn’t look like the usual Palahniuk fan, and she told me she was there with her 14-year-old daughter Rebecca, who barely said a word, the shy chubby-but-will-blossom-to-beauty-eventually hardcore bookish no-social-skills type.

It was clear that her mother, a rich woman who talked to me about Scotland once she heard my accent (and tried cracking onto me a bit, which I just found funny and slightly sad, as my wife was sat right next to me), had no clear idea about her oddball daughter and she had driven her to the reading, a four-hour round trip, because she was taking her other daughter to a horse show in Kentucky the week after and “felt she should do something” for Rebecca, obviously not relating to her or even gaining much pleasure from the experience. Which, judging by the author she was about to watch and the crowd around us, wasn’t hard to understand why.

I asked the mother if she’d ever read ‘Haunted’, because we had by now found out that the reading was for the paperback release of the book (I had had no idea why the author was appearing initially; hadn’t put two and two together for some reason, and wasn’t aware the paperback was coming out) and it surprised me somewhat that she would let her daughter read a book like that.

She said no, she hadn’t read it, and we talked a bit about the content and how grim and graphic it was. She said Rebecca hadn’t told her anything about the book, but said she fed her mother sort-of philosophy snippets from here and there in Palahniuk’s books. Obviously did that so her mother thought she was reading something highbrow as opposed to about 13-year-old boys eviscerating themselves whilst masturbating. Classic stuff indeed.

We discussed Stephen King books, how I had read King when I was 11, other horror novels before that even (used to be a horror fan when I was younger), and she said that King had been the standard when we were younger (though she was a good ten years older than either Ellen or I) and that maybe we were showing our age by talking about some of Palahniuk’s stuff like we were, in distaste. And there may well be an element of truth in that.

As I said, the crowd were mostly no older than their mid-20s, after which age there was a massive fall-off. Which means that people older than that have no real interest in the man’s work, finding it juvenile or stupid or sick, and thus he’s a 44-year-old man pumping out juvenile deranged splatter-porn trash to people at least two decades younger than him. Not exactly the definition of a well-adjusted individual. Then again, if there’s a buck in it, you know…

Only in America.

Anyway.

7.30, the time of the reading, rolled round, and Palahniuk asked that small children be taken away before he started, a nice way to set atmosphere and raise expectations and get an age group who genuinely should not be hearing his stuff away from him. He then proceeded to talk a bit, telling a couple of separate stories. He talked about how people come up to him at readings and tell him stories after he reads out ‘Guts’, the aforementioned now-notorious story about a 13-year-old boy having his guts sucked out when he masturbates in a swimming pool. Says that people now tell him all kinds of sick stuff.

First story was about how a man came up to him at a reading and spread a load of photographs out in front of Chuck. The people were old naked or half-naked men. ‘Why are all these people sleeping I thought - then I realized they weren't sleeping.’ Palahniuk said with a faux shocked smile.

The guy with the photos worked in a porn peepshow, and the pictures of the old men were guys who had died masturbating to erotica. Before calling the cops he would take photos of them, and obviously took great pride and pleasure in showing his still-life camerawork to somebody who would appreciate the artistry and pathology behind them.

'These are the images that swim through my head before I go to sleep, all these naked dead old guys’, noted Palahniuk.

I turned to my wife. ‘He is mentallll!’ she sort of sing-song sang to me, as disturbed as I was by this revelation. There has been real, extremely horrifying tragedy in the author's life, and it has definitely steered his head down some dark alleyways. His grandfather shot and killed both himself and his wife, after trying to kill Palahniuk's father. His father was later dating a woman whose ex got out of prison and killed them both, burning down the house they were in to make it look like an accident. I wondered idly if any of the old men in the photos reminded him of his dead father. Then I jammed that thought very, very far into the back of my head.

One woman told Palahniuk a story supposedly from her youth about how, when she was seven, she learned how to masturbate to orgasm by accident with a vibrating heating pad and showed all her seven-year-old friends how to do so, but was beaten by her mother when she came home early one time and found them at it.

Said she hadn’t had an orgasm since she was seven, and she was now 40, but “If you can read that ‘Guts’ story out and not be affected by it then maybe I can use this story, turn it into something good and not have it use me.” Of course he’s not going to be affected by it – it’s not his story, so why should he be embarrassed (apart from the obvious reasons about discussing the masturbation habits of kids that young) to relate it to other people?

I like the fact that he has to try and put some sort of therapeutic spin on it, like he’s doing the world a favour by relating these stories people have told him, instead of it just being the frottage it so obviously is, him getting a sick kick from relating dumb prurient crap in public.

But what Palahniuk seems to have conveniently forgotten, or put aside on purpose, is that he’s only taking the word of these people that their stories are true, when in fact they may well just be lying to him to impress him or to get a story into his book, telling him what he wants to hear (because make no mistake, Palahniuk wants to hear this stuff, oh yes, gets right off on it) as they do so.

He then told a story about a teacher with a miscarriage of hers kept in a jar to educate kids with that ended up splattered on a floor in front of a class. Ho-hum. He also told another story about how a severed arm prop from his readings was sent to every bookshop he was doing a reading at round America. By pure chance it ended up being sent to a lot of shops where a climber who had had his to amputate his arm (can’t think of his name, sorry) to survive in an accident was reading the night before Palahniuk on his own book tour at the same time as Palahniuk’s.

Bookshop staff would keep on going up to the climber and asking him if the severed arm was a prop of his. Palahniuk said that the climber apparently thought it was one of “the funniest fucking things he ever heard,” so he was lucky that the climber had a sense of humour about the true, and utterly bizarre, story.

Then it was time for Chuck’s new story, ‘Mister Elegant’. Joy. Ellen told me she hoped he wasn’t going to read ‘Guts’, because she wouldn’t have been into hearing it and would have had to leave (she read it when I had the book out of the library) but almost wanted to hear him read it just to see the look on the suburban rich mother’s face as he did so. The author handed/threw out a load of cheap foul-perfume-smelling plastic roses (more showmanship) with a note attached to the stem saying “With All My Love” to make the room smell like “your granny’s living room.”

Then he launched into this story about a male exotic dancer (who handed out red roses during his act – clever connection, eh?) who didn’t take his epilepsy medication and ended up having a fit on the dance floor on a hen night and losing control of his bowels, an event which is duly videotaped and goes viral on the net. The eponymous dancer meets a woman who introduces him to a load of severely deformed people he teaches to exotic dance and…ah…who gives a shit?

The story, which took a good half an hour to read out, was absolute garbage from start to finish. I looked round the crowd’s faces for a while during it, not paying attention except in odd spots, bored, and eventually had to stop myself from laughing out loud, the story was so ludicrously over-the-top and stupid and poorly written.

It exhibited the usual Palahniuk trademarks of repeated sentences, Catholic ‘eternal damnation’ ranting and a weird obsession with super-obscure sickening medical conditions that only about three people in the fucking history of the world must ever have suffered and which the author must scour the net and/or esoteric medical texts to find and then flimsily construct some ridiculous sort-of-story around.

He is an obsessive writer, no doubt, but it’s just that his signpost obsessions – medical and sexual – are so outrageous and hyperbolic that, in one way, it’s difficult to take offence at them. But on another level, looking past the work to the person beneath, it’s much easier to be offended. Or, more precisely, creeped out, because the psyche that assembles these obsessive traits into a fractured demented game-of-chicken I-dare-you-to-read-this narrative is quite clearly a very dark one indeed, and that pretty much goes without saying.

Ellen asked an overweight 15-year-old girl sitting next to us if she liked Chuck “because he’s so weird and sick and creepy?” To which the girl chuckled and replied yeah. But what these inexperienced bored suburban middle class kids (getting a vicarious kick out of his work because their own lives are so trouble-free and sterile and repressed) can’t see is the genuine sickness and damage behind what they perceive only to be a good way to gross out their friends or parents. Chuck’s gross! He’s so cool! Huh, say what? What does ‘psychopathology’ mean? No, he doesn’t really get off on or mean that shit! Does he? Does…he?

You tell me.

Your guess is as good as mine.

So after endless eternities of polysyllabic medical terms and balls flapping out of g-strings and people with circus freak deformities, the story finally, FINALLY THANK CHUCKING FUCK finished. He then threw a load of plastic jelly-gore-filled eyeballs and black plastic rats (the latter apparently a big plot point in his new book, which is apparently finished) out and about the crowd before finally getting down to the final stage of the evening, the Q&A.

He announced that he would do it girl-boy, girl-boy, and each person asking a question would get a much bigger plastic rose. A few questions were asked: “What’s your favourite book and what book have you enjoyed reading?”; “What other works of yours have been optioned?”; “How do you keep track of all the characters and events in a book?”; “Have you ever fantasized what it’s like to die violently…horribly?”

Sorry, that last is one of mine I had thought about, a line from the classic 1985 punk zombie movie ‘The Return of The Living Dead’. And it went unasked. But I did ask a question. I had to; couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste, and throwing verbal barbs into a room full of fawning sycophants is one of my specialties: I don’t suffer fools gladly, I gladly make fools suffer. I raised my hand.

“Man in jacket.” Chuck walked across to me and handed me one of his big plastic roses. I smiled.

“I’m from Scotland, so I’ll let your ear acclimatize to my accent for a few moments before I ask my question,” I said. I have to do this in America, otherwise bitter experience has taught me that people will not be able to understand my Scottish accent. But women love it (to a ridiculous degree), so it’s a bittersweet trade-off.

“Oh, Scottish, I was just with Irvine Welsh last week,” Chuck noted.

“Yeah, met him a couple of times. But can I ask you Chuck…have you ever masturbated to the image of Brad Pitt in ‘Fight Club’…or…” And then I asked a second, related question.

The crowd immediately erupted with laughter. Some of them had heard my question, but only the first part because the second part had been drowned out by their hilarity. Chuck chuckled himself.

“What’s Brad Pitt like as a person, is that what you’re asking? I can’t understand your accent,” he smiled, making fun of the question as he stalled for time and an appropriate answer to it.

“No. I get that all the time, I’m incomprehensible but it sounds nice.” I slowed myself down to a really easily understood speed. “I’ll say it slowly. Have you ever masturbated to the image of Brad Pitt in ‘Fight Club’…or would he have to be dead for you to do that?”

The crowd laughed again, but really only because they had mostly only heard the first part of the question. I looked Palahniuk right in the eye and smiled. His eyes widened in shock and he blushed slightly as he took in what I said, and I almost half expected him to clasp his hand to his head like an old lady and whine about never having been so insulted in all his life.

“Those are a really easy two to answer, no and no,” he snippily replied and the instantly turned away from me to redirect the Q&A session. I like how it’s okay for him to say rehearsed mad shite but if somebody else says something weird he turns all prude and thinks it’s rude and crude.

I had just creeped out the King of Creepy.

Result!

Mission accomplished.

Ah, nothing like asking a writer giving a reading before an adoring crowd if he's a necrophile, eh? Like I said, I just wanted to make my point about his extremely morbid personality with humour, but with force too. Just to let him know what I think (for whatever that is worth - doubt he'll care too much) about his artistic methodology and personality in general. 

You'd think that after you had undergone stuff like the murder of family members, stuff no person should ever have to undergo, that you'd not be too impressed with human misery and pain and wouldn't go looking for sickness to roll in like a pig in shit. But not Palahniuk, and there's only so much leeway you will grant somebody because of their past before you tell them to get a fucking grip. 

He's a hack, getting his audience to do his sick legwork for him, the high priest of harmful matter harvesting sick extreme tall tales confessed to him by his twisted adoring young audience then selling it back to them and laughing all the way to the blood bank.

There's no real creativity or imagination on display here (ironic for somebody who keeps on going on about 'the craft' of writing and supposedly tries to help his Cultists out in their writing careers; I just hope he doesn't get them to drink any Kool Aid a la Jim Jones); this stuff is tabloid journalism equivalent, completely artistically bankrupt and hardly worth publishing.

But it makes money.

And that’s all that matters.

It is.

Isn’t it?

Ellen summed up Palahniuk’s writing quite succinctly. She said it’s like somebody cutting themselves because they can’t feel anything. He’s trying to gross out his audience, but they lap it up and come back for more, forcing him to try and up the sick ante until there’s no point anymore.

All that’s left is empty graphic sociopathic psychosexual distortion, fingerpainting in blood and excrement and semen for a bored jaded audience of trauma voyeurs, literature reduced to the artistic equivalent of child porn or snuff movies. A big sick circle jerk all round; preaching to the perverted converted choir; great stuff indeed. ‘Fight Club’ had intelligence and a genuine message behind it, but with each new book of Palahniuk’s it looks more and more like a high point in a career on an excited ever-downward spiral into the worthless lowest gutter levels of extreme human experience.

After my question we left, because we had seen and heard enough for one night. I certainly won’t be reading any more Chuck Palahniuk books, I must admit, not after his agenda has become so blatantly clear and obvious. I doubt very much he’ll miss my patronage. After all, he has plenty of other people to tell him how great he is, to tell him mad weird sick demented disgusting stories to keep him in novels for quite some time.

Only thing is, do you want to read them? I know I certainly don’t. After all, at 36 I guess I’m too old for this shit. And so is Chuck Palahniuk. At this point it would be much more surprising to me if the writer actually started writing something human and warm that actually made his readers feel something other than revulsion. But I don’t think he has it in him. Good thing he has a million more confessions to take from his young naïve congregation and doesn’t have to worry about writing anything genuinely emotionally affecting.

Because that truly would be a shocking story indeed.

THE END