TIH 590: Chuck Palahniuk on Shock Induction, Psychedelics, and Avocado

Video transcript. Please add around 3 minutes for the audio.

00:00:02.57
Michael David Wilson
Chuck Palahniuk, welcome back to This Is Horror.

00:00:06.42
Chuck Palahniuk
Michael and Bob, thank you for asking me back.

00:00:09.73
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, it is an absolute pleasure. And the last time that we spoke was actually around this time last year for not forever, but for now. So as I often do, I want to know what some of the biggest changes for your impactful events have been in the past year.

00:00:33.35
Chuck Palahniuk
In the past year, ah Oh, this is going to sound terrible, but a friend introduced me to psychedelic mushrooms, and and I find that for the first time I can i can write very serious, um but I can also write funny when I want to be funny, but I'm not always thrown to being automatically funny or sardonic.

00:00:56.97
Chuck Palahniuk
that I found with with shock induction, I could actually write an emotional scene where characters were hurt and empathetic and sympathetic ah without just kind of batting away those emotions. And so yeah, mushrooms make all the difference.

00:01:18.09
Michael David Wilson
That is a really interesting contrast to the opening the last time that we spoke because you said you were off alcohol last time and this time you're beginning with I'm on mushrooms.

00:01:32.26
Chuck Palahniuk
And I am off alcohol. you know I found that alcohol was another sort of thing that I was using to kind of deny or evade any kind of emotional connection.

00:01:43.44
Chuck Palahniuk
And mushrooms seem to really allow for an emotional connection ah that I really haven't had for a long time. I'm not on mushrooms right now.

00:01:55.27
Michael David Wilson
and Yeah, yeah, just just to clarify.

00:01:56.29
Chuck Palahniuk
Okay, let's just say that.

00:02:01.30
Michael David Wilson
But it i I almost find it difficult to believe. It's like you've just been introduced to mushrooms. It's like, you know, it at this point.

00:02:12.67
Chuck Palahniuk
I took them in college and in college it was just this kind of random fistful of mushrooms that you took with your friends at the beach. And it was just so hard to to understand the dosage or the effect. And at a time when my brain was really not as sort of finished as it is now, but recently they they're legal in Washington state, at least in the form of gummies.

00:02:40.32
Chuck Palahniuk
and And I find that they they kind of deliver me to that manic phase, that manic state for a few hours when I seem to do my my best work. I can really hypnotize myself, psych myself into a character and write from within that character in a very effective way for really two or three hours.

00:03:01.46
Bob Pastorella
Hmm. So that makes a lot of sense because I always feel like an alcohol, they they say, you know, it it it allows you to be more inhibited, but I always felt like it allows you to be more closed-minded. Whereas if you go into mushrooms or psychedelics, then you get an expansion of yeah of yourself and a connection with the world around you that alcohol doesn't, doesn't give you.

00:03:29.17
Chuck Palahniuk
I would, you know as a ah vulnerability where alcohol just seemed to to sort of be an armor, ah be a kind of warding off any kind of vulnerability.

00:03:37.31
Bob Pastorella
Right.

00:03:40.64
Bob Pastorella
Mm-hmm. And then, but you know, then you have like, you really, what I call sad drunks, you know, the people who get drunk and all they want to do is cry and commiserate over the regrets of their life and things like that. And you just want to give them a big hug and go, Oh man, it's going to be okay. You know,

00:04:01.42
Chuck Palahniuk
But what you're talking about is a kind of connection with your own emotions as opposed to an empathetic connection with other people's emotions or a character's emotions.

00:04:08.95
Bob Pastorella
Right. who

00:04:10.67
Chuck Palahniuk
So alcohol puts you in touch with your own unhappiness, but it doesn't do much to connect you to other people.

00:04:14.98
Bob Pastorella
Right.

00:04:18.42
Bob Pastorella
Yeah. Now I want to try psychedelics again, but you know, I'm in Texas. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

00:04:26.32
Chuck Palahniuk
ah Okay, I'll send you some.

00:04:32.18
Michael David Wilson
But I mean I would imagine too that you know now the types of psychedelics that you can get a hold of are going to be of a much better quality than let's say 20 years ago where particularly in the UK you just have to go down to Camden and find some guy and, you know, now like you, you look at things like mainstream outlets like Tim Ferris's podcast and, you know, they're all about Psilocybin and expanding the mind. And so I just imagine what you're getting. it It's of a higher quality and it's going to, as you say, you can control that dosage more too.

00:05:17.40
Chuck Palahniuk
And at the same time, I'm very wary. I want to keep Flowers for Algernon in mind and try to make sure I'm not destroying my mind as I'm kind of heightening my ability in these brief periods.

00:05:33.45
Michael David Wilson
And so, I mean, what does that look like in terms of when you're taking psychedelics? Do you have any rules as to how often you're doing it or in what situation?

00:05:48.57
Chuck Palahniuk
This is going to sound kind of crazy arbitrary, but most of shock induction I wrote while I was frozen into my house during an ice storm in the middle of this last winter. There were about 10 days when we had feet and feet of snow outside and it was nothing but the white noise of wind blowing and there was no street traffic. No one could come within miles of where I lived.

00:06:14.29
Chuck Palahniuk
And it was basically like being in in the shining. I was in a large house, completely snowed in. All the light that came into the house was that kind of very blue, blue-white sort of complete lack of visual stimulation and lack of auditory stimulation because of the wind. So it was really just me and the computer and the wood stove and the story.

00:06:40.06
Chuck Palahniuk
So that kind of complete lack of external stimuli allowed me a focus I've never had before and allowed me to do this enormous rewrite in what really only amounted to a couple of weeks' time.

00:06:56.34
Chuck Palahniuk
And again, I'm not endorsing, I'm not endorsing locking yourself away and and doing succogenic drugs, but it worked.

00:06:56.46
Michael David Wilson
Yeah.

00:07:07.38
Michael David Wilson
Well, people have to do what works for them at the time. We always say your mileage may very take the advice that you like and discard what does not work. But I mean to go.

00:07:22.27
Michael David Wilson
all the way back to the beginning. What was the origin story for Shock Induction? What was your why?

00:07:32.13
Chuck Palahniuk
In 2019, I was asked to come down and to pitch all the streaming platforms with every idea i could that that came to mind. And I was fascinated by the idea that that when people ah succeeded, they they immediately left their spouse and they got a trophy wife. They upgraded to a much more maybe attractive, but more status indicating um spouse, man or woman. In fact, when Fight Club went into production as a movie,

00:08:05.12
Chuck Palahniuk
Someone really highly placed with the production of 20th Century Fox took me aside and said, now that you have a movie in production, are you going to stay with Mike? And I've been with Mike ah for five or six years at that point, and it had never occurred to me that I should ditch Mike just because I had a book becoming a movie. But that is what so many people do, especially writers.

00:08:30.51
Chuck Palahniuk
is at the moment they get some success, they ditch the old spouse and they upgrade to a trophy spouse. So I thought by extension, why wouldn't people apply this same dynamic to their kids that, you know, why should you take a chance on just staying with the kids that you've you' born and raised? Why not upgrade your kids as well and just kind of cut loose your existing kids and with the hope that somebody else would find them appealing and someone else would adopt them. But you yourself should not be stuck with just the kids that you can have, that you should be able to to upgrade the way you would a spouse.

00:09:12.98
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, and I think too that the way that shock induction and this greener pastures universe is created, you you said before that in the future,

00:09:25.08
Michael David Wilson
People will crave their fifteen minutes of privacy rather than fifteen minutes of fame and this is. The ultimate vision of that because there is no privacy left everything can everyone has been publicly commodified and available to the highest bidder.

00:09:45.08
Chuck Palahniuk
And you have to wonder what's gonna happen to all of these OnlyFans models in even a few years when they age out of that system. ah There's gonna be an enormous kind of displacement of labor, of kind of eroticized labor that we've never seen before. And I find that all incredibly fascinating. Will they all end up as a kind of Marilyn Monroe sort of tragic figures? Or what will they sort of move on to?

00:10:13.91
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, I think with that kind of thing, there is like a ah ticking clock. And so really it's like, let's just kind of, I was going to say milk it. Well, I mean, literally and, and metaphorically let's milk it as well.

00:10:25.89
Chuck Palahniuk
Ah.

00:10:28.79
Michael David Wilson
And for as long as we can, and then see kind of what we have at the end.

00:10:36.08
Chuck Palahniuk
And it's it's rather short-sighted, but I think that's also ah ah the other appealing aspect of of of shock induction was it's trading that kind of but full potential for a kind of complete stability. The rest of your life is not going to be what you want, but it will be completely guaranteed and stable. And you won't have to worry about being sort of cast aside and you know and laid off and made redundant, made obsolete.

00:11:08.35
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, and I mean, of course, another element of this book, and as always, we'll jump around to different topics, is ah hypnosis. And I understand that in terms of your preparation, you went to HypnoThoughts Live as part of the research. What was that like? And was that one of your first experiences with the hypnosis scene, for want of better phrasing.

00:11:40.79
Chuck Palahniuk
It was, last year I took ah courses from a local hypnotist and he he taught me a lot of the distinctions, but he also said that I needed to go to Hypnothots just to sort of get a fuller understanding of the entire Hypno thing. And it was about as close to a psychotic break as I ever want to come because Everyone knew these mentalist tricks and these hypno games and these different techniques, except for me. And so in every conference, in every presentation, I was basically the sucker. And so I got played by all these people who do it for a living. And that left me with this enormous confusion. It it took me weeks to kind of come out of it. I felt like I really had dementia for a while.

00:12:32.65
Chuck Palahniuk
Yeah. And it was all, it all took place within two and a half days. So I really had no time to process it. It would be, you know, these very long days of being with these people and then going back to my hotel room and not drinking. And so it took me weeks to try to process, you know, what I just experienced.

00:12:56.77
Michael David Wilson
And so in terms of those experiences, what were perhaps some of the more unusual or the more shocking during that conference?

00:13:10.71
Chuck Palahniuk
Oh, you know, when I was a reporter, this would have made a great kind of farcical piece because in just generalized ways, I noticed that all of the men that I was interacting with in this hundreds or thousands of people They were all either reverends, so they were ministers, they led congregations. And so so much of what they did in terms of public speaking in their churches was about hyp hypnosis. It was about finding compliance by shouting, who give me an amen? Who who will give me a hallelujah? And then whoever is out there in the congregation that shouts amen or hallelujah,

00:13:54.96
Chuck Palahniuk
You know that they're compliant and you can work that person or you can work those individuals to sort of build a deeper and deeper compliance. so So much of this ministry was about hypnosis. And another aspect of ah ah the men was that they were they wanted to be stage hypnotists. So they were all guys who wanted to work on cruise ships, or they wanted to wanted to work the big corporate events where you would go to some place like AT and&T or Microsoft.

00:14:27.58
Chuck Palahniuk
And they would tell you the message they wanted you to sort of hypnotize into their workforce. So you would do these huge executive retreats. where you have a hundred people and you'd be doing what seemed to be a very entertaining, funny stage show. But at the same time, you would really be hypnotizing them to be more productive and to be more loyal and to you know sacrifice everything for the company. So you had the ministers, you had the guys who wanted to lead executive retreats for for big corporations because that's where the money is.

00:15:05.56
Chuck Palahniuk
But you also had the guys who wanted to work cruise ships and you had these kind of skeezy comedian guys who wanted to do sexy suntan lotion and to hypnotize drunken women into sexualizing ah themselves on stage in this very public way. So you had this huge spectrum from these religious men who are doing it for their congregations, their churches, to these who these men who are doing it because they want to get drunken women to fondle their breasts on stage. And then among the women in this in this convention,

00:15:46.41
Chuck Palahniuk
they for the most part saw themselves as healers. And so they were about healing and nurturing and and hypnosis was a kind of form of therapy. And so it was all very nurturing in that way. But this whole ah break between women as healers and men as kind of manipulative leaders or controllers was interesting to be with. um And that's just one of of a million different very small things.

00:16:20.61
Michael David Wilson
And you said about kind of getting played during yeah did the presentations and the different situations, but did you also have many interactions with people who yeah just in in what was meant to be a normal conversation, it's like, wait, they're trying to use their material on me kind of outside of this presentation.

00:16:46.98
Chuck Palahniuk
One of the good news, one of the good things I learned was that the hardest people, if not impossible people to hypnotize are men over the age of 50. And I am 62, which really puts me outside of the window for hypnosis.

00:17:03.37
Chuck Palahniuk
ah So that seemed to kind of be working in my favor. And I noticed that for a lot of the men who were who complained that they could not be induced into a trance, for the most part, they tended to be older older men who presented as as, I would argue, more intelligent ah than than a lot of the people who could be induced very easily. And there were these strange kind of ah power games. ah One that stands out was a

00:17:34.56
Chuck Palahniuk
a woman who was a hypnotherapist and she insisted that she had increased her her breast size by writing a script and listening to this hypnotic script every night as she fell asleep and that every month that she listened to the script her breasts increased one cup size and I thought I was kind of, speculate i I was skeptical. I thought, you know, maybe you just stood straighter or maybe you just tensed your pectoral muscles a little more, or maybe you just held your shoulders back and presented your chest larger. and But I really didn't see how hypnosis could enlarge her breasts.

00:18:15.71
Chuck Palahniuk
And in response to that, she took out her phone and she started showing me photographs of her breasts from the beginning throughout several weeks or months of this script. And in a way, I wanted to be polite, but I did not want to be standing there in public looking at photographs of a woman's bare breasts as she insisted they're larger. You have to say they're larger. And she just kept on sort of um dominating by by presenting her breasts shown from what I thought was different angles. I really thought that it was the angle of the tele of the the phone that made them look larger or smaller. And and when I continued to be skeptical, she started to pull up photographs of her mother's breasts, who was a much older woman.

00:19:09.37
Chuck Palahniuk
And she insisted that she had increased the size of her mother's breasts with hypnosis. And now I'm looking at the bare breasts of an even older woman in a public place until I finally acquiesce and say, OK, I understand you've done it. It works. um But in some cases, it did seem like it was more about dominating than it was about actually convincing me.

00:19:38.32
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, that is a surreal situation to find yourself in. and I mean, in terms of those photos that she was presenting, it kind of sounds like some of those body transformation photos where you see that this has happened in, in 12 weeks with muscle building, but then the lighting and the angle and, and even what the person is wearing and they've like shaved down their chest hair.

00:20:07.75
Chuck Palahniuk
Yeah, yeah.

00:20:07.90
Michael David Wilson
And it's like, you're using all of the old tricks to make it look to visually appear that you're more muscular, but in, in fact, you're not, you know,

00:20:21.69
Chuck Palahniuk
So it was interesting to be the skeptic in a huge space full of believers because everyone there was a believer and was very invested in in hypno hypnosis.

00:20:35.08
Chuck Palahniuk
And I didn't want to sort of disillusion anyone by by sort of reigning on their parade.

00:20:42.25
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, I think it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, or it's like you're going there because you want to believe. It's like if you go to a religious convention or you become a member of a cult, it's fairly easy to get people to go along because they want it to be true. There's a desperation in it.

00:21:05.73
Chuck Palahniuk
And I love cults, I adore cults. And so in that way, I just, I really loved being there because it's nice to be around people who have this kind of strong faith um and and are at least unified by that that shared faith. um And it's nice to be in this kind of community where where your role is kind of dictated by the faith, by the belief system. And I write about that so much in in every book since Fight Club.

00:21:35.00
Chuck Palahniuk
is that Fight Club gives you this very consensual, but very structured way of being together. And that's a lot of what I found at HypnoThoughts.

00:21:46.08
Michael David Wilson
And so prior to writing this book, had you ever been hypnotized before? Have you hypnotized someone? I don't know if this is something that has been an interest along proceeding this book or if it's only really turned up for writing shock induction.

00:22:05.86
Chuck Palahniuk
it was really something I only wanted to um to use for shock induction. I knew that the story was gonna be just too linear, that it needed another kind of meta layer to it. And I was looking at hypnosis. I've also been taking acting classes because the different sort of techniques or methods for getting into character seemed like there would be really good meta layers to add to a narrative.

00:22:34.47
Chuck Palahniuk
mushrooms. There's a lot of sort of psychogenic stuff that's also baked into shock induction. um A lot of ah books are being kept out of prisons because papers become the new medium, or for decades now, the medium for getting drugs into prisons.

00:22:52.43
Chuck Palahniuk
And there's been so much in the culture about people picking up paper money off the street that is saturated with fentanyl and people having these kind of episodes because they have exposed themselves to a kind of transdermal, a fentanyl.

00:23:10.72
Chuck Palahniuk
And so there's just so much in the culture about paper as a means for delivering drugs that I wanted that to be another meta level. But auspiciously when I went into hypnosis, it was because when I was three years old, I developed this huge growth on the side of my neck, like a tiny three year old Chuck Palahniuk with this giant growth. And the doctor thought it might be this kind of fibrous tuberculosis.

00:23:45.30
Chuck Palahniuk
And so this would have been in 1965 and my parents who were very young parents, they had to take me to the hospital for his operation where they were going to cut into this growth and see what the nature of it was. And at some point, according to this family story that I've always heard my entire life, the three year old me, I died. I was dead on the operating table for two, three, four minutes before the doctor went out into the waiting area and told my parents that I was dead. And my parents went through this intense grief and shock. And the doctor went back to the the operating theater and at some point I wasn't dead. So he had to awkwardly go back and tell my parents, your child has been dead for about five to seven minutes, but your child is alive now.

00:24:38.48
Chuck Palahniuk
And I was always curious because I'd heard that story so many times. My mother loved to tell that story because it had such a happy ending. They were so bereft and then they were suddenly so joyous that it made a really, it's a story that delivered her, that always returned her to a state of sort of euphoria and ecstasy. And so she loved to tell the story because it made her happy. But I always wondered,

00:25:05.08
Chuck Palahniuk
where was I during that five to seven minutes? So I went in and asked the hypnotherapist, can you try to get me back there? Can you show me what may or may not have happened? And over the course of months of hypnotherapy, I kind of got a really good answer, but I don't want to talk about it here because it will make me sound like a lunatic. I don't want to be one of those near death experience kind of crazy sounding people.

00:25:33.87
Chuck Palahniuk
but it was a fantastic discovery. And it was another thing that kept me exploring hypnosis.

00:25:43.37
Michael David Wilson
Do you think it is something that you will ever talk about in any medium or is this something you just you won't talk about publicly?

00:25:54.12
Chuck Palahniuk
You know, I'll never say never, but to talk about it now would sound would make me sound like a crackpot. um Yeah. And it's enough that it makes me incredibly happy. The discovery I made in hypnosis made me happy in the same way that my recovery and my failure to die made my mother and my father happy. And so I don't want to kind of lose that happiness by sharing it. I want to hold on to it.

00:26:27.18
Michael David Wilson
So on that basis, if people have things that they want to recover from their past, would you recommend hypnosis or at least for people to consider going down that path?

00:26:44.16
Chuck Palahniuk
I think I would, but I think it really depends a lot on the practitioner. Because even in hypnotherapists, I met a lot of people who seem to be very good at it, and a lot of people who just really wanted to be very good at it. And the people who wanted to be good at it tended to be bullies. And nobody needs to pay money to get bullied. And so if you do see a hypnotherapist, just be really careful in choosing the right one.

00:27:12.94
Chuck Palahniuk
because the ones who can't do it will just take your money and just kind of bully you for the whole period.

00:27:22.38
Bob Pastorella
Yeah. and Years, years and years ago, they, it's a lot of the nightclubs I used to go out to when I went out, we had probably about every couple of months we'd have a hypnotist come and do, you know, like the, the, the show. And one of the first things that they would talk about is how they, they're actually licensed hypnotist and they can, they can, you know, they, they have a ah a lot of services that they can talk to you about, but they want to do some, some entertainment.

00:27:52.31
Bob Pastorella
And one particular evening and that I remember distinctly is I had a friend of mine who was convinced he could not be hypnotized. And so we watched the show. He said, all this stuff is fake. All these people are planted in the audience and all this. It's all fake. I have a bachelor of science degree in psychology. So I'm like, well, there's some truth to it, but you know. And so after the the show, the hypnotist was hanging around in the bar.

00:28:18.18
Bob Pastorella
And, you know, having a couple of drinks and things like that. So my buddy decided he was going to go and, and, and, you know, basically talk to this hypnotist and tell him that he could not be hypnotized, that he's one of those people. And hypnotist, you know, told him, Hey, yeah, there's, there's, there's quite a few people that, you know, I can't, I can't hypnotize very quickly. He goes, every, everyone has a different threshold.

00:28:43.11
Bob Pastorella
And he goes, and even if you feel like that you have like the issue that you need to be working with, you want to quit smoking, something like that, even if you can't be hypnotized, I may be able to help you work through that.

00:28:54.72
Bob Pastorella
He goes, that's, that's something in my practice. And so while he's talking to my friend, he leans over and says something to him and then looks at us and goes, y'all need to get him because he's out.

00:29:07.28
Chuck Palahniuk
Yeah.

00:29:07.95
Bob Pastorella
He hypnotized him that fast. And we, you know, we caught him and laid him down. And then he says, Hey, I'll do, I'll do, I'll do a couple of things, but I can't make him do anything he won't do.

00:29:18.89
Bob Pastorella
Like, you know, and so, uh, he made him bark like a dog and he made him, uh, act like he, you know, become a table and and he sat down on him and all this, you know, so.

00:29:31.67
Chuck Palahniuk
that's That's called human bridge and it is incredibly unethical and they've lectured against that.

00:29:35.74
Bob Pastorella
Yeah.

00:29:37.39
Chuck Palahniuk
Human bridge is off the table now, but please.

00:29:40.15
Bob Pastorella
Yeah, yeah this you got to keep in mind too, this is probably like maybe 15, 20 years ago. you know So things obviously things have changed, but yeah, he he's hes sat down on him.

00:29:52.61
Bob Pastorella
and a You know, and, and talked a little bit to us, you know, and, uh, he gave everybody a card and he said, Hey, the only thing I'm going to make him remember is that he barked like a dog. That way he'll know he'll be that he was hypnotized, but he won't remember me sitting on him. You know, so he, and he woke him up and it took a minute to get him awake. Cause he was very, very deep.

00:30:15.19
Bob Pastorella
And when he came to, it was like he, we had him to where he was just sitting down, but he continued the same sentence he was saying when he woke up. It's like, he didn't just like, you know, come, come out of it slowly. It's like, when he came, when he finally came out of it, he was talking, he was like, and then, and then he was like, looking around, he goes, when did I sit down? You know, and we're like, oh, dude, you got hypnotized. And he was like, bullshit, got a bunch of liars. And he goes, do you remember barking like a dog? And he goes,

00:30:43.29
Bob Pastorella
Yeah, yeah, I did bark like you hypnotized me, didn't you? He was like, I can be hypnotized. And he was like, yeah, he goes, you went under pretty quick. He goes, but you went pretty deep.

00:30:54.69
Chuck Palahniuk
Well, and I'm curious because with the whispering, a lot of times that is a form of what they call shock induction, that in hypnosis, you know like the title of the book,

00:30:54.88
Bob Pastorella
No, it's just interesting.

00:31:04.31
Bob Pastorella
Yeah.

00:31:08.78
Chuck Palahniuk
ah You either kind of exhaust the person by calling their attention to too many things. You kind of exhaust and confuse them to the point where their rational mind sort of disengages for an instant.

00:31:14.63
Bob Pastorella
Mm hmm.

00:31:21.12
Chuck Palahniuk
Or you shock them so that their rational mind is kind of disoriented for a moment. And and at that point, ah they're vulnerable.

00:31:32.90
Chuck Palahniuk
you can You can induce the trance. And so I'm wondering um just that what that whispered word was or the sensation of suddenly having that person that close in your physical space.

00:31:46.47
Chuck Palahniuk
Because there's a lot of forms of physical hypnosis where you touch the person's neck and you pull them in such a way that they feel like they're falling for a moment. Like ah like you go through in the hypnagogic trance as you're falling asleep.

00:31:56.26
Bob Pastorella
who

00:32:00.44
Chuck Palahniuk
You feel like you're falling for an instant. and it throws you into this kind of panic fight or flight state. And that's what makes you vulnerable ah so that that you can, that hypnotic trance can take place.

00:32:13.78
Bob Pastorella
Yeah, that's how he did. That's how he did like when he did the show when he had like, you know, volunteers. Uh, some of them, he would, he would lean in and and you couldn't hear a word he was saying and they would, they would go out and he would go sit, please. And they would sit down, you know, cause he had them all stand, but a couple of them, he would go in close and he was like, Oh, you're going to be a little tough one. And he would, and he would put your arms out in front of you and he grabbed their hands and tug them. And he'd be like, sit down, please. You know, and they'd all sit there and he goes, Hey, I want y'all to all just go to sleep.

00:32:49.02
Bob Pastorella
And once he had everybody done and they just, you know, not out and we're like, wow, this is crazy. You know, but with my background, I'm like, this is, this is believable. I'm actually seeing what we talked about in class and like, and it was really cool.

00:33:05.90
Chuck Palahniuk
And also going back to compliance like with the religious people who will give me an amen, who will give me a hallelujah.

00:33:12.63
Bob Pastorella
Right.

00:33:12.88
Chuck Palahniuk
The first part of a hypnosis is finding out who's gonna be compliant. And so those people who volunteer to go onto the stage are slightly compliant.

00:33:18.29
Bob Pastorella
huh

00:33:23.83
Chuck Palahniuk
And after that, you're you're basically kind of testing them to see who is gonna be the most performative. And your friend proved himself compliant by simply going forward in the bar and saying, you can't do it.

00:33:35.94
Bob Pastorella
Yeah.

00:33:36.07
Chuck Palahniuk
And so he made himself the most compliant person.

00:33:40.19
Bob Pastorella
Yeah. If I remember correctly, there was it, I think I'm fairly confident there was one person that he asked to go back and sit down. Because I think, I don't even think he tried to to to to tug them.

00:33:54.65
Bob Pastorella
You know, I think he just basically looked at them and and said something and then he says, Hey, you can, you can have a seat. He goes, you're going to, you're going to mess up my whole thing. You know, and I was like, Oh, I can't be hypnotized.

00:34:06.27
Bob Pastorella
He goes, well, you probably can. He goes, but for this, nah, you know, Yeah,

00:34:09.94
Chuck Palahniuk
Exactly, you get a bunch of people up there and then you just start culling them until you get the ones who are gonna put on the best show.

00:34:18.76
Bob Pastorella
it's fascinating stuff.

00:34:21.98
Chuck Palahniuk
And you combine that with ah the suggestion of psychotropic drugs in the paper. And then you present it with a story, a kind of um guided meditation. And going back to Fight Club,

00:34:36.93
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club more or less really starts with those support groups where the people the people who are dying are taken on a guided meditation. You are approaching the palace of the seven doors. You open the green door. What is beyond the green door? You step into the cave of your power animal. And then we get the penguin.

00:34:59.40
Chuck Palahniuk
And so a lot of people argue that the narrator in Fight Club never came out of that hy hypnotic trance, that the entire narrative is that person induced into a trance like in in the movie, ah what am I thinking of? The movie that is kind of constant nested loops.

00:35:21.11
Chuck Palahniuk
Insurrection, no, what am I thinking of?

00:35:22.93
Michael David Wilson
Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio.

00:35:23.90
Chuck Palahniuk
and

00:35:24.20
Bob Pastorella
Inception.

00:35:25.76
Chuck Palahniuk
exactly yet where you're just you're going through one portal after another which hypnotists call loops nested loops where you're taken through one doorway or one window or just one rabbit hole after another and you're taken deeper and deeper they're called ah deepening the trance techniques deepeners and then you're constantly anchored with little triggers And in shock induction, the the word paramecium is the anchoring device that is supposed to constantly bring you in or out of trance. ah like Sounds are a big part of hypnotic induction um because they're nonverbal. so Sorry, I just went down a rabbit hole myself and I can't get myself back out.

00:36:16.10
Chuck Palahniuk
But again, ever since Fight Club, I have been kind of doing that kind of guided meditation, which I think good story good storytelling does. It walks you into the situation in a physical way, as opposed to just dictating it.

00:36:33.65
Michael David Wilson
yeah And I think with shock induction, there's such a balance that you're achieving here because you're simultaneously telling the story of Samantha Deal, who somehow we haven't even named the protagonist yet. We've been talking for over half an hour, of but she is, of course, the protagonist who's parents have kind of put her on the market to trying to, to sell her and she's quite rebellious too. But you've got that, you've got the dystopian and the greener pastures universe, but you're trying to balance that with hypnotizing the reader. How did you kind of strike that in terms of trying to employ these techniques and simultaneously present a story?

00:37:29.02
Chuck Palahniuk
I always think of long-form prose as oral storytelling. And, you know, ultimately my teacher who died just a couple of weeks ago, my best teacher, ah Tom Spanbauer, had a heart attack just before I left for tour. And Tom always made us present our work out loud. Because if you read it out loud, you will find out where you're no longer interested in yourself, where you bore yourself.

00:37:57.73
Chuck Palahniuk
And you can see in your audience, you can see that another aspect of hypnosis is they call it eye capture, which I think is a fantastic term. You want to catch the person, make them look into your eyes, look into my eyes. And as soon as you capture their eyes with eye capture, then you can really control or guide them, induce them into ah into a trance.

00:38:22.42
Chuck Palahniuk
But if you tell a story out loud, and you can't even trance yourself into the story, then you know that story is not worth it, that it's not well written, or it's not worth hearing.

00:38:33.81
Chuck Palahniuk
and so Telling the story out loud or telling it in a way that ah an oral storyteller would tell it with that kind of immediacy and that kind of constant shift to second person or third person or first person, ah keeping that, keeping it really fresh ah has always been a big part of my my my technique in rim writing fiction.

00:39:01.11
Michael David Wilson
And another aspect that I think kind of is something that goes into this too is not only Are you telling the narrative of Samantha Deal? But there are also these hallucinatory passages. As you said in the afterward, there's a lot of references to Alice in Wonderland. I mean, there's a lot of references to many texts, the Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But because you've got these hallucinations,

00:39:40.64
Michael David Wilson
I mean did did do you even know which parts of reality and which parts are hallucinatory as the author because there there are some bits where it's like well it could it could kind of go either way here.

00:39:55.73
Chuck Palahniuk
well You know, really at its core, I wanted to write a book about books. ah And so in the style of minimalism, the idea is to present the same thing for so many number of pages, but to present the same topic in as many different ways as possible. And my classic example is always to the television commercial. I didn't really understand minimalism in Tom's workshop.

00:40:20.73
Chuck Palahniuk
until I came home from workshop one night and I turned on the television and there was a a commercial for Skipper Seafood. And within that few number of 30 seconds or whatever, they showed us ah napkins, signage, ah containers, happy families. They showed us fish. They showed us all these things that basically all equated to Skipper Seafood.

00:40:46.31
Chuck Palahniuk
And so in shock induction, I wanted to depict books in as many ways as possible within a book. So really it starts with you're the physical object that a book is, feel the paper, listen to the sound that it makes as you turn the page. And then it goes to the Senate Subcommittee on Education Hearings about why no one is reading long-form prose anymore.

00:41:13.21
Chuck Palahniuk
So it is overtly ah announcing that this is gonna be a book about books. And going into the second act, right out of my mind on mushrooms, I thought, how can I present books in a different way in the second portion of the book? And I thought, what if I sampled classic public domain party scenes? So I looked up The Great Gatsby, which is the ultimate party scenes.

00:41:41.83
Chuck Palahniuk
and Anna Karenina, party scenes, and basically lifted passages from famous literary parties and put my characters into them. And so in that way, I could present, again, books, but in a different way. And so throughout the entire book, you're basically seeing the topic of books presented over and over throughout the book until the end of the book. And that's another way I wanted to make it very meta.

00:42:11.60
Chuck Palahniuk
because I wanted to write a book about books for people who love books. And so it would be about books on every level and it would really accomplish that minimalist thing.

00:42:26.48
Michael David Wilson
And of course, the authorities within shock induction from the start are very much against books, you know, they're trying to get them And they feel threatened by them and this also feeds into the way that they're selecting who will and who won't be successful in greener pastures i mean the idea is to weed out those who are rebellious to read out to weed out sorry those who are going to be disruptors they want conformity and you know books

00:43:05.34
Michael David Wilson
They have ideas, they encourage rebellion. So I love that juxtaposition of what's simultaneously going on, particularly in in the prison system and trying to get rid of these these books and within the schools with the way that greener pastures as an entity operates.

00:43:29.75
Chuck Palahniuk
you know and ah You know, people complain about piracy on the internet. And the downside is that, yeah, to some extent it's harder to make your living as a writer or as a filmmaker or as really anything because your work can be pirated so easily. But on the upside, I think if the right idea came, if someone got the right idea, the idea that would just sort of change the culture in in an instant,

00:43:55.36
Chuck Palahniuk
That idea could go around the world a hundred times within a moment. And the upside is that when somebody gets a better idea, it's going to change everything so quickly and it will be impossible to suppress. And so in a way, that was the idea for these enhanced reader editions in Shock Induction, these books that the government is trying to suppress by the end of the book.

00:44:20.85
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, and I mean the author's note in chapter 33, where you talk about these billionaires creating this website and then making a customized steamroller.Where did this come from? I need to hear more.

00:44:42.41
Chuck Palahniuk
It was at a book event. It wasn't my book. I was supporting another book. But afterwards, and I had to change some of the details for legal reasons. Afterwards, a party, a very ah very happy tech billionaires approached me and told me that they were going to make all literature available to all people, regardless of copyright or compensation to the authors. And they sat there so self satisfied and just so thinking that I was going to applaud them for it that I thought, you know, dude,

00:45:21.64
Chuck Palahniuk
you've got health insurance and I need to pay for my health insurance. So you know you need to maybe be thinking about how this is gonna affect writers who are just barely scraping by.

00:45:36.09
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, it's such yeah um a bizarre situation to find yourself in. And what were they taken aback by your and negative reaction? Were they so self-absorbed and confident in this that they they didn't anticipate that an author might not be for this?

00:45:57.39
Chuck Palahniuk
You know, i it was such an awkward moment. I barely remember, I remember suppressing my my rage, just suppressing just how profoundly angry I was in that moment. And I just remember them being sort of hurt that I wasn't more grateful and happy ah that they they had this grand vision.

00:46:21.17
Michael David Wilson
And of course you have different passages and chapters a little. like this throughout the book that are separate from the main narrative, although they all kind of come together and feed in. Another particular favorite towards the end is a cautionary tale from Mindy Bee. So I mean, in a sense, this is also an epistolary story because of all the different mediums and the way

00:46:53.53
Michael David Wilson
That it's been presented i mean goodness you've even got two chapters that are a single word.

00:47:03.36
Chuck Palahniuk
That was an experiment and my editor, Tim, loved the idea that we would just repeat the word avocado like a mantra until it lost all meaning. It just became a pattern on the page like wallpaper. And so I felt sorry for the guy who would eventually have to do the audiobook because he was going to have to say the word avocado with all these different intonations.

00:47:27.56
Chuck Palahniuk
And, but that wasn't my problem. So it was really about sort of doing as many of those tricks because the way we consume story now, ever since we started channel surfing with the remote controls, we started to really cut story in our minds in a different way. ah Maybe film started doing this because film cuts Reality the way that we blink the way that we have to blink in order to sort of break up reality into bite-sized chunks that we can process so in a way the film cut is the equivalent to you blinking your eyes and Supposedly that goes back to eye capture Because if you can hold someone's attention and keep them from blinking

00:48:16.09
Chuck Palahniuk
then you can really induce them into a trance state. And I see Bob just touched his eye, which means I'm not doing my job right because he had a physical sense that he was him. The idea is to kind of, by constantly introducing new textures and doing eye capture, you are you' are constantly renewing someone's interest in the subject and you're You're forcing them to consume, in this case, long form pros very much the way that they would web surf in very small bites or the the way that they would channel surf in very small bites of things that have very different textures.

00:49:01.33
Michael David Wilson
Okay so we we have to talk for longer about the avocado scenes and we have to then talk about Samantha's uncle and I think the story arc with Samantha's uncle is so satisfying and one of my favorite parts of the book incredibly disturbing but there's such a wonderful payoff and revelation and so this is a guy who he's wheelchair bound he spent seven years in prison he's a sex offender and samantha essentially has to look after him and amongst other things clean his shitty diapers so that's the uncle

00:49:49.34
Michael David Wilson
Now I wonder, now he doesn't say a lot, but what he does say is avocado many, many times. Of all the words to repeat, why avocado?

00:50:05.08
Chuck Palahniuk
He, the uncle, ah supposedly, as part of his backstory, was in a sexual encounter where the safe word was avocado.

00:50:16.13
Chuck Palahniuk
and He was subsequently sent to prison because he claimed he had forgotten that the safe word was avocado, and he had continued the sexual encounter beyond the point that avocado was was said. And so avocado, as that safe word becomes this this thing that he repeats to himself as the moment that he really screwed up, he fucked up in such a way that the rest of his life was gonna be about the fact that he'd forgotten the word avocado, supposedly forgotten the word. So you know it could be rape, it could be not rape, ah but that's what avocado really represents is this this ultimate failure in life, whether whether you intentionally went forward with a sexual encounter and raped someone, or whether you were just stupid and you were just forgot that avocado was a safe word,

00:51:11.45
Chuck Palahniuk
Avocado really comes to present that that moment where you fucked up in such a way that the rest of your life is going to be about that moment.

00:51:22.04
Michael David Wilson
Yeah. And you said that, you know, you've got avocado for many pages, but it's not just copy and pasted because sometimes it's hyphenated. Sometimes it's italicized. Sometimes there's an explanation mark, an exclamation mark, even after it. And have you listened to the audio book?

00:51:46.90
Chuck Palahniuk
No, you know I listen to the auditions, but I don't listen to the book because I really more and more I've been trying to play to the fact, like with last year's book, not forever but for now, having different passages repeated in different languages, because nowadays throwing a strange foreign phrase in in Sanskrit is not a hurdle anymore. It gives the reader a greater participation. The reader can decipher foreign languages more readily than they could in the past.

00:52:25.29
Chuck Palahniuk
So it makes devices like that a lot more appealing, ah a little more of a game. And so I just i feel sorry for the the the actor who has to figure out how to say all these strange phrases in foreign languages, um but I just don't want to hear it.

00:52:44.79
Michael David Wilson
So I have listened to the audiobook so I've read it and I've listened to the audiobook a number of times in preparation for this and I have to say he does an amazing job of the avocado scenes and there's so much variation in terms of how he delivers it.

00:53:06.37
Michael David Wilson
And i mean yeah if i were to audition anyone to repeat avocado for five minutes it would be that guy he absolutely spot on but i did find it funny that i was looking at people's responses to this and there was somebody who'd written a review getting very upset that five minutes of the audio book is just avocado but

00:53:31.77
Chuck Palahniuk
Well, see that yeah in my day, when you listen to the radio, every once in a while, the GJ would go to take a crap and have to leave the booth and the record would skip. And you'd be listening to AM radio and there would be a skip in the record and everyone within listening market would be hearing that skip.

00:53:55.21
Chuck Palahniuk
And you knew that the DJ was in the bathroom doing a number two or otherwise they would be fixing the skip. And then suddenly the DJ would rush back into the booth and the skip would end and there'd be a moment of sort of levity. But in those moments of disconnect, it's very much like shock induction, like Bob's friend getting whispered is that suddenly the rational world breaks down.

00:54:23.74
Chuck Palahniuk
And the rational world that you want to be, this orderly, continuous flow of information that makes sense, it suddenly doesn't make sense. There's there's a ah break and the break is very upsetting. And it's supposed to be upsetting because that's why it's shock induction. And so again, repeating avocado is very much like the DJ in the bathroom completely helpless while the record skips and skips and skips. And it's also like Bill Withers in that great song, Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I ought to leave the young thing alone. Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone.

00:55:17.71
Chuck Palahniuk
We love that. Oh my God. Bill Withers just works. I know so many gorgeous ways and he breaks the language down and the language, those two words become musical notes and it creates tension because you want the song to continue and it illustrates longing and it illustrates this' this this gorgeous frustration. ah She's underage, she's underage, but I love her and she makes my life special. And I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I gotta leave the young thing alone, but there ain't no sunshine when she's gone.

00:56:04.64
Chuck Palahniuk
And so again, we're going back to creating frustration, creating ah depicting longing, ah and also generating frustration and anger in the reader so that they can feel what the uncle is feeling. That guy, whoever reviewed the book and said, it really pissed me off, felt exactly how the uncle felt as he spent the rest of his life saying avocado to himself.

00:56:37.66
Bob Pastorella
Mission accomplished.

00:56:37.82
Michael David Wilson
yeah oh oh yeah no and and for for me that there was so much packed in to the the avocado scenes because yeah you've you've got frustration you've got humor you've got confusion you've almost got despair like how long is this gonna go on for but

00:56:39.39
Bob Pastorella
yeah

00:57:06.38
Chuck Palahniuk
And you know and are I always think that a story doesn't work unless there is some point where the language breaks down to chaos. ah Because in my favorite songs, ah the language breaks down to chaos. Eventually, the Beach Boys are just wailing. They're yodeling. We no longer have words. We just have extended musical notes. Or we have Sid Vicious screaming at the end of a punk rock song. We have some point where the song breaks down to just the rhythm in Be My Baby by the Ronettes. At some point, a song breaks down to complete chaos, whether it's the loss of vocals or whether it's vocals becoming noise, screaming, yodeling. And so in a short story,

00:57:55.22
Chuck Palahniuk
or a book, I think that there has to be a point where the language breaks down to chaos. Otherwise, the book has the the the work hasn't done what its potential is. It has to bring language to chaos.

00:58:13.49
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, and speaking of chaos there, that striking image kind of at the end of the uncle passage, Seemed like a homage to one of my favorite horror movies in a very blatant way. And I i don't want to say anymore because I don't want to to really spoil that for people going in. I want them to go into it cold and to not see what happens at the end of the kind of uncle Samantha scene.

00:58:49.12
Chuck Palahniuk
Well, I thought my my clever thing was ah ah repeating basically the execution of the horse, Froo Froo, in Tolstoy, tying that to this despicable figure because Froo Froo, the little mare in the steeplechase scene, is such a completely sympathetic figure that to to kind of recreate that scene but with a completely unsympathetic figure in the form of the predatory uncle, um I just felt like I was playing a trick on Tolstoy.

00:58:57.34
Michael David Wilson
Yeah.

00:59:21.82
Michael David Wilson
Yeah. And I mean, talking about you know having these references to other books and being in conversation with other texts. I mean, how how important do you find this is in general? Of course, with this book, as you said, it it is essentially a love letter to books, but do you think referencing these other tomes is a good kind of storytelling

00:59:56.41
Michael David Wilson
a device not only to tell your own story but to elevate it.

01:00:04.47
Chuck Palahniuk
Well, you it ah um just on ah on a crafty, wily level, you want to reward the smart people. The smart people are going to be like, hey, wait, this is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or this is a passage from Moby Dick that he has usurped this this gorgeous passage from Moby Dick for his own purposes.

01:00:27.57
Chuck Palahniuk
And they'll feel smart and righteous that they recognized it. And the people who aren't as well read will sort of stumble over this strange new style for a passage. And it allows them a discovery process where they can slowly find out after the fact that this is what I was doing.

01:00:47.56
Chuck Palahniuk
And there's a a great sociologist named Shirley Bryce Heath. And she says that that a book doesn't become a classic unless it forms a community of people to understand it. And her favorite example are would be Tolkien. That people have to really come together to talk about Tolkien to try to have a full understanding of Tolkien or of of books like the Dune books. They're so rich that people have to form a community and they bring people together to to to really understand what's taking place. And so ultimately with those excerpts, with all these different methods, you want to create a certain amount of confusion so that people do go to community to try to understand the parts that they did not understand or that they felt were beyond them. So it forces people to reach out through the internet

01:01:42.66
Chuck Palahniuk
to try to you know contact each other and to really understand what's taking place here. Thank you Shirley Bryce Heath.

01:01:52.72
Michael David Wilson
There you go. And I mean, with with this as well, I know that a few years ago, you put out greener pastures on substack. So I want to know Is this a completely different story in the same universe? Is this an early version of what became shock induction? Because one imagines that there is a link between the two.

01:02:24.22
Chuck Palahniuk
You know, in my mind it was like what Danielewski had done with a House of Leaves, that there was this giant rambling first draft on the internet and people read it and then ultimately he turned it into a book and he did in a book the things that he could not do on the internet where he he ran the words in these spirals and these different patterns.

01:02:47.36
Chuck Palahniuk
so with each medium with the internet he did it one way with the printed book he did it a largely different way because he could took you take advantage of ah the new medium printing it on paper would allow him to pattern the words in in different ways and so The serialized version on Substack, which I think I put out in 2021, was very fatty compared to what the book is. It was probably way too long, and it had too many backstories. It had too many tangents.

01:03:23.59
Chuck Palahniuk
But the internet allows for that because you don't have to hold the entire internet in your hand. ah when you When you're sitting on an airplane and you've got to hold the physical thing, you want it to be much more of lean and much more manageable. And so, and again, going back to House of Leaves, with each iteration, I was trying to to do what each medium would do better.

01:03:52.52
Michael David Wilson
And I wonder how did the response from your initial readers on Substack shape the shock induction book?

01:04:04.25
Chuck Palahniuk
You know, ah I don't trust response. And that was another reason why Tom had us read our work out loud. Because when you read the work, the most honest response is whether people gasp or whether they touch their eye like Bob did.

01:04:23.51
Chuck Palahniuk
whether they look at their watch, whether they laugh, whether they cry, you want to see what the moment the response is in the moment, because everything after that is so intellectualized and so processed that it's really more about the reader than it is about the story.

01:04:42.87
Chuck Palahniuk
and so I don't think I could trust the intellectualized after the fact response that I would have gotten from the sub-stack serialized version. Because once people have to articulate their response, I don't trust it as much. It becomes about them as opposed to about the story itself. And that's another reason why I really push my students to read their work out loud in a setting where other students can hear it.

01:05:17.04
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, I've noticed, too, a commonality for your fondness for England, because Samantha Deal is deemed to be the Queen of England. That is what you set up to have. And of course, you know, your previous novel,

01:05:34.65
Michael David Wilson
Not forever, but for now was set in the English countryside in in Wales, in fact, I think. So the UK, at least. And so do you have an affinity for England? Is this something we're going to see a lot more of going forward?

01:05:54.45
Chuck Palahniuk
Well, in a way they were kind of strange little bookends for each other, because not forever, but for now, was written just before Queen Elizabeth II died. And so in a way, it ends the reign of Elizabeth, but then it presents a new queen in the promise that Samantha Deal is supposed to marry Prince Charlie, Prince Archie. prince arch And so in that one small way, it is a kind of, there is a symmetry between the two books.

01:06:26.79
Michael David Wilson
Yeah. And I mean, with, with Samantha deal, and I guess with, with the whole book, I mean, the, the idea is that you can have any job in the world, except the one that you actually want that is right at the core. And that is the kind of nightmare reality, because I mean, how does, how does one even navigate that if that is your destiny?

01:06:56.58
Chuck Palahniuk
But it's a destiny that ah young people really face very early in their lives. Do I take the job of the post office because it's got benefits and it's got stability and I can do it, or do I sort of follow my passion? And there are those people who can do them both, ah Bukowski, who can deliver the mail and write his stuff.

01:07:17.74
Chuck Palahniuk
But there are a lot of people who take the stability job and they try to practice their passion on the side. And toward the end of their life, they've deferred all of their passion and they realize very late in life that it's too late, that they've they've missed a window for training and developing their talent. And once that window is closed, they're gonna have to come to terms with the fact that they chose stability and and safety.

01:07:46.59
Chuck Palahniuk
over ah over the thing that that excited them as a young person. And I think it's it's a terrifying choice, but it's something that people look at at the age of 17 and 18.

01:08:02.23
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, and we've said before that this is very prescient, this book. And I mean, another way that it plays into people's lives, there's a scene where we find that a kid has been secretly put on the market by his parents, but he couldn't even attract the minimum bid.

01:08:23.75
Michael David Wilson
and one day he might find out about that and it will absolutely crush him but i think and it it to a point goes back to some of the things you were saying about only fans because a lot of people find out every day through social media or through only fans that actually they're not as popular as they thought they would you're you're putting You know a post out into the world and we see the ones that go viral we see the success is but for every hugely popular only fans creator there is the person who uploaded lots of content and nobody gave a shit.

01:09:08.38
Chuck Palahniuk
And you know who's making money? Only fans. The platform, the device that communicates their vulnerabilities to the world is the only entity that is consistently making bank.

01:09:11.99
Michael David Wilson
Yes.

01:09:20.55
Chuck Palahniuk
And so in a way, Greener Pastures is the entity that is ongoing making money. from whether these people sort of you know sell their souls or don't sell their souls. it' the It's the kind of mediating entity that is the the one that's always consistently making a profit. And I find that so angering and heartbreaking at the same time.

01:09:46.93
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, yes. And I mean, that there almost seems to be a tie-in with War Dog and Stephanie and such an interesting character there.

01:10:01.55
Michael David Wilson
And I think Stephanie is the perfect name, particularly for Daddy to talk to. There's something, of it ma maybe it's just the

01:10:14.05
Michael David Wilson
I don't know is it is it just how it sounds lyrically when it comes out of your mouth or is it the fact that it's free syllables because i did think stephan is the perfect name but i'm trying to work out why why is it so good for that situation

01:10:30.64
Chuck Palahniuk
One thing that that kind of works in an odd, broken way is that Stephanie spells her name one way when we see her attribution. But her father, when he addresses her, Stephanie is misspelled, is spelled a different way.

01:10:45.97
Chuck Palahniuk
So he's it's kind of it's a physical demonstration that he clearly does not know who she is, or he clearly devalues her. And so that was another trick I wanted to do throughout the book was those type typographical errors. Because when you stumble across typographical errors, again, it's ah it's another form of shock induction where your brain is scrambling and your brain is frustrated and your brain is thinking, who the hell is this guy? Didn't anybody ever edit this book that they couldn't even spell this word right?

01:11:18.42
Chuck Palahniuk
or they misquoted this this one sentence from the great Gatsby. Because ah in the party sequence, there's a reference to a great pitful of oboes and cellos and all these instruments. But I just changed pitful into pitiful. And the reader will stumble there, think, you know, and somebody's clearly not caring about this book.

01:11:44.16
Chuck Palahniuk
But all of these typos are intentional for creating these these beats of refreshing like that. Boom. It pops you in that Brechtian way out of the narrative. You're thinking, what the hell was that? What what the hell was that? but Why is he saying avocado so many times? God damn it. What's he doing?

01:12:06.32
Chuck Palahniuk
and it's creating that frustration and ranking you present to the story again. ah It's in hypnosis what they would call deepening devices, these moments that deepen the trance.

01:12:19.33
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, I find whenever I'm reading one of your books, because of the expectation that previous books have set, I'm waiting to be tricked. I'm waiting for that error. You know, I remember the tomato famine in not forever, but for now, the Richard and David Attenborough confusion. So that there's an anticipation for that, but In spite of it, you know, you often still catch me off guard.

01:12:50.16
Chuck Palahniuk
Well, it always is a great device for creating sympathy with the narrator. yeah The very first thing that Scarlett O'Hara says in Gone with the Wind is war, war, war. There's not going to be a war. And we're thinking,

01:13:05.63
Chuck Palahniuk
She's rich, she's lovely, she's adored, and Christ is she in for a big fall. She's so stupid and naive that our heart goes out to Scarlett O'Hara because despite all of her advantages, we're smarter than she is and we know there's gonna be a war. We thought her we know that her entire world is about to be destroyed. So despite all of her advantages, we feel sympathy for her.

01:13:32.48
Chuck Palahniuk
And so when you have a character misstate something, you create an opportunity for the reader to feel superior and sympathetic towards the character. I think in in doomed or damned, Madison, the very adolescent narrator, ah she quotes the Bible as, it's easier for a a rich person to go to heaven than it is to push caramels through the eye of a needle. And just by saying caramels instead of pushing a camel,

01:14:01.93
Chuck Palahniuk
ah creates that moment of enjambment, they call it in poetry, where you have an expectation and you get the wrong connection. And so that that disconnect, that enjambment, ah it it it heightens the reader's presence to what's on the page. And they have to go back and think, did I just read the wrong word there? Or was it the wrong word?

01:14:26.13
Chuck Palahniuk
it's ah It's like when you see badly translated menus and you see the typo that that makes the whole menu very hilarious. It gives you a real sense of the humanity of whoever created the menu. And your heart is engaged on an emotional level. You're no longer just intellectually engaged. You're engaged in a kind of under the radar, emotional level. And that's what these getting things wrong does.

01:14:53.46
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, you of course see that quite often here in Japan with the English menus, but you know, sometimes these so-called mistranslations or these direct translations, there's something endearing, there's something

01:14:58.85
Chuck Palahniuk
Ah.

01:15:11.26
Michael David Wilson
that that makes it so much more recognizable and you you want to order those things, you want to engage with those shoppers. it it I guess it's this idea of goodness, how is it put where the floor becomes the selling point, um the bug becomes the feature. yeah

01:15:31.42
Chuck Palahniuk
Um, years ago I was in Barcelona with a bunch of writers and David Sedaris was one of the writers and we were in in a big dinner at a restaurant and there was a translated item on the menu.

01:15:44.16
Chuck Palahniuk
that said, feet of unborn pigs. And David just had to order it to see what, this can't be the feet of unborn pigs. And it was, it was the aborted fetuses of pigs and all these little gray legs were all pickled and arranged in a big wreath on the plate. So it was this big glossy gray wreath of the feet of unborn pigs. And it was a hilarious, completely disgusting moment.

01:16:13.55
Chuck Palahniuk
um for that to come out of the kitchen and for it to land in front of David and everyone laughing, laughing and feeling disgusted at the same time. But it's only because he thought it was a mistranslation that he ever ordered it.

01:16:29.23
Michael David Wilson
Right, yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. And I mean, talking of abortion, which which is not what I thought I'd be saying during this podcast, but I mean, there's so much packed into this novel that we haven't even mentioned the pregnancy, the abortion, stealthing. And, you know, that there's so many topics within Shock induction, although again, it's like I'm remiss to to go, I'm remiss not to mention them, but I also don't want to go into too much detail for for fear of spoiling.

01:17:12.08
Chuck Palahniuk
Yeah, you know, ah the abortion, there is no abortion. But thank God. ah But it is a device for forcing Samantha to to push something greater at stake than her own talent.

01:17:19.38
Michael David Wilson
Yeah.

01:17:27.22
Chuck Palahniuk
You have to constantly escalate what the stakes are and in the book. And so deep in the second act, we need to put something more at stake than just her own happiness.

01:17:38.85
Michael David Wilson
Yeah, yeah and on whilst there might not be an abortion that you know there's a great deal of uncertainty as to whether there might be and so that creates a lot of escalating tension.

01:17:54.90
Chuck Palahniuk
And in a way to go take it back to horror, I've always loved Rosemary's Baby. And that's this just a book I will study for the rest of my life. And so much of that book is about ah kind of culturally coding the tragedy of thalidomide and how when women trusted their doctors and did exactly what they were told for the entire term of their pregnancy only to to have their hearts broken.

01:18:22.62
Chuck Palahniuk
and And also in Rosemary's Baby, there was a lot of kind of pressure ah around abortion and about reproductive control, ah whether the the the mother should have it or whether the doctor should have it. And so you know part of me will always be rewriting Rosemary's Baby in each of my books.

01:18:43.39
Michael David Wilson
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're coming up to the time that we have together today, but I want to ask a question we've got from one of our patrons, Robert Stahl.

01:18:57.17
Michael David Wilson
And this really takes it to horror because he says, your short story Guts is a masterclass in horror with its gruesome descriptions of what happens to the guy at the bottom of the pool. Can you give writers some pointers onto how they can create such intense descriptions in their own works?

01:19:21.03
Chuck Palahniuk
Wow, you know, Guts that's would deserve its own one-hour podcast. But the things that work in Guts, again, going back to Scarlett O'Hara, the one part that really hooks the reader is where the narrator sees what's happening, and he thinks it's a sea serpent. Something white has come out of the, a sea serpent has been hiding in in the the drain of my parents' swimming pool, just waiting to eat me. And the reader recognizes this as the Scarlett O'Hara moment, where Scarlett says, there's not gonna be a war. And it guts the narrator saying, it's a sea serpent. And in that moment, the reader is more intelligent than the character who's having the experience.

01:20:11.83
Chuck Palahniuk
And so the reader is pulled in on that frustrating avocado level where the reader feels, recognizes the typo and feels superior to to not just the character, but feels superior to the writer because the reader suddenly sees the writer, me, demeaning myself as I present this story. I'm kind of casting aside my status and my dignity to tell this story.

01:20:39.06
Chuck Palahniuk
And so in a way, the reader is feeling very superior and very protective of me in a very human way. And that opens the reader up to be the vulnerable person. So it's a misdirection forcing the reader to to to fix what the narrator is getting wrong. But at the same time, it opens the narrative it opens the reader up to having to carry the full horror of what's happening. It occurs,

01:21:07.54
Chuck Palahniuk
The horror occurs in the reader's mind in the same way that in Rosemary's Baby, we never see the baby. We look into the bassinet. We see Rosemary's expression of horror. We get this discordant music. Again, we're going to chaos in the moment, this discordant, screechy music in that moment, ah which is ah basically a trumpet. It is really ugly, ugly music. And we never see the baby.

01:21:36.35
Chuck Palahniuk
And in our mind, we have to fill in the blank. Same with Gwyneth Paltrow's head at the end of Seven. Brad Pitt opens the box. He looks in the box. We get all this chaos going on around Brad Pitt. We get his reaction. We never see Gwyneth's head in the box. And so in Guts,

01:21:57.60
Chuck Palahniuk
We cannot simply say, my bowels are prolapsing into the into the the drain of the swimming pool. We have to describe it in a wrong way so that the reader makes that ultimate connection. And the reader is forced to carry the horror of that realization before it's overtly stated. And the reader is forced to carry that horror for maybe half a page, maybe a full page before it's confirmed.

01:22:27.30
Chuck Palahniuk
And by then, pretty much every reader is going to realize what's taking place before the narrator does. And it's in that moment, again, the Scarlett O'Hara moment, where the reader realizes the truth before that the narrator does, that the real horror occurs. And that's where people start fainting.

01:22:49.46
Michael David Wilson
Well that is one hell of a note for us to go out on and it has been a tremendous pleasure as it always is chatting with you so thank you very much and I wonder do you have any final thoughts for our listeners and viewers?

01:23:09.13
Chuck Palahniuk
You know, more and more, i I see every short story and every ah book as an experiment. And it has to be an experiment on every level. It has to be a way of reinventing long-form prose, not just telling the story you're telling, but reinventing the language entirely to support that story and and hoping that it works as an experiment.

01:23:36.66
Chuck Palahniuk
And I deeply, deeply appreciate the fact that people buy enough of my work that each time I make enough money that I can go back and do another experiment. Because I really am living from experiment to experiment. And it's only the the income that I get from the books that allows me the time to write another book, to make another experiment. And if I didn't have that income,

01:24:04.87
Chuck Palahniuk
then I would be back to working at the post office or Freightliner. And so I do appreciate the support to doing yet another experiment.

01:24:15.97
Michael David Wilson
Okay, thank you very much.

01:24:18.76
Bob Pastorella
yes thank you

01:24:21.23
Chuck Palahniuk
Thank you.

01:24:40.73
Bob Pastorella
Yes, thank you