TIH 600: Chuck Palahniuk Dissects His Infamous Short Story Guts

Michael David Wilson 0:28
Welcome to This Is Horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson, and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob Pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity and much more. Well we did it. We reached 600 episodes and 12 years of This Is Horror Podcast, and to celebrate Chuck Palahniuk is joining us today to talk about his infamous short story, guts. Now Chuck is the author of Fight Club and a load of other great, thought provoking transgressive stories, including his latest book, shock induction. But really, he doesn't need any more of an introduction than that, and he probably doesn't even need that introduction. So let's take a quick advert break and get on with the episode in 1867

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Michael David Wilson 2:38
Okay, here it is. It is it is Chuck Palahniuk on This Is Horror. Chuck, welcome back to This Is Horror.

Chuck Palahniuk
Mike, Michael and Bob. Hey.

Michael David Wilson
You know, last time we spoke, it had been about a year, but this time it's only been a month or two. So I'm anticipating that there haven't been too many big changes in your life, but if you're on a new drug or something new is going on, then please share with our audience.

Chuck Palahniuk 3:16
For December, a friend gave me a gift. A trainer at the gym gave me the collected ghost stories of Mr. James, and he's from England. He's from Shropshire, and he loves Mr. James. So for all of December, I've been reading the collected works of Mr. James, and I've been reading Haunters on the hearth, which is a collection of Christmas Eve or Christmas time ghost stories from Great Britain. It includes ghost stories by even d h Lawrence. So I've been reading a lot of British modernist, Victorian era ghost stories.

Michael David Wilson 4:01
Yes, Rob shear, I'm pretty familiar with because it's only about a 45 minute drive from where my parents live and from where I grew up, in terms of Mr. James. Is this your first time reading James?

Chuck Palahniuk 4:17
It is my first time reading James and not hating James, there is very little modernism that I can really stomach, and I've really had to develop a taste for it. The only stories to date that I really loved is perseville, Percival, Langley Abbey. It's a got a huge Victorian porch on the front of the story. Pages and pages of context before we finally end up with two guys on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean in the middle of the night. And one guy tells the story to the other guy, but that huge Victorian porch, uh. I finally got through that. And the story that is actually told is magnificent, the thundle Abbey story. Thornley, Abby, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 5:10
and so, I mean, I'm wondering, what do you think is the most effective method in terms of storytelling with Mr. James, if you were to kind of pinpoint it to something specific,

Chuck Palahniuk 5:28
you know, the one pitfall that I that people don't recognize in ghost stories is that they're ultimately a comforting story, since they do suggest and offer proof of the afterlife. They are a spiritual story. And they they are, you know, proof that that death is not death, that there is something beyond. And so overcoming that ultimate fear, which is negated by the ghost story form ghosts exists. Death is not forever. In a way, a ghost story is, is any Christ like figure that promises eternal life? The ghost in some form, promises eternal life? How do you get past that ultimate reassurance and still arrive at something horrific and with Mr. James, I find myself much more fascinated by the fact that they're all antiquitarian objects that James himself was a historian specializing in antique objects, and so his protagonist, his storytellers, tend to be people who find a monkey's paw or a manuscript or a whistle, and the power that is inherent in that object is this unresolved power that becomes frightening. And so my pet theory is that since Great Britain spent so much time in empire building and bringing objects back to Great Britain with little or no understanding of what those objects were for, I think there was this enormous kind of unresolved guilt and fear that those objects would retain a power, that even though they were in the British Museum, they still would have an innate power that wasn't understood and did put people in danger. It's kind of a theme I explored in my book lullaby, where someone kind of pirates a lullaby and puts it in a public domain book, not realizing that the lullaby is actually a spell of sorts. Anyway. So my theory is that Mr. James was kind of dealing with an overall British fear and guilt for having plundered so many objects without and then taking them out of the context and not really knowing what those objects were for or what they were capable of. So that's the through line I find in Mr. James, in terms of horror, this unresolved understanding of the object.

Michael David Wilson 8:10
It's really interesting, as you speak about Mr. James, to think about how relevant so much of what you just said is to the short story, guts, which we're here to talk about, and indeed, to the overarching novel, haunted, which is part of I mean, of course, this idea as to what happens after death, or if you can go beyond death, is something that we kind of find out right near the end, is part of the design of Haunted to talk in relatively vague terms, so as not to spoil the entire book in the first five minutes, and then this idea of objects and power That speaks to the invisible carrot, which, of course, is the whole kind of, I guess, like the overarching image within guts. But then also, as I decided to read haunted as part of my preparation, it's like, Well, every story in haunted has an invisible character, has something that people are intimately ashamed of, and you know that there's a wider commentary throughout life and through people's experiences, we all have these invisible carrots

Chuck Palahniuk 9:38
well, And I would argue that the basis of horror itself is finding a metaphor for the thing that people cannot openly talk about during that period in history, and they feel this huge unrecognized, unresolved for the fact that they gave their baby thalidomide. Well, they took thalamus, and their baby turned out. Malformed, or that they grabbed all the contents of all the Egyptian tombs and took them to London without having any idea what those objects were or if they might have even carried a pathogen, because there was a lot of fear that the plunder from Tut's tomb would carry germs or viruses that might have killed people who are intimately in contact with those items. So again, these things that we can't talk about in guts. There is that the French term Esprit de escaria, which is spirit of the stairway. It is when the language finally comes to you, but it's only too late. It's only as you're leaving the party where you've been insulted and you're on the stairs halfway out of the building that you think of the perfect comeback. But it's too late to deliver it. And so in a way, horror, I would argue, is about talking about what we can't talk about and what we haven't even recognized as our anxiety, and that it's only years later that we actually realize what Dracula was about, what Frankenstein was about, and at that point, the the issue, the anxiety has already passed.

Michael David Wilson 11:22
Yeah, and of course, the reason that we're here today, we are celebrating various things, is actually 600 episodes of This Is Horror Podcast. It's 12 years of the podcast, and it's 20 years since guts was first published in Playboy. Oh, got

Chuck Palahniuk 11:44
20 years. Yeah, it was in The Guardian also, God bless the guardian. Yes,

Michael David Wilson 11:50
yes. So, I mean, when you reflect back on those 20 years, I mean, how do you feel about guts today?

Chuck Palahniuk 12:02
You know, we had tried to sell guts to play boy, and at the time, their fiction editor was this big, good natured guy named Chris Napolitano. And Chris said, No way. No, nobody's going to buy this. No, we are. This Playboy is not buying this story. And then I ended up reading it at the Barnes and Noble on Union Square at this massive book event, 600 people. Probably it was. It was a sold out capacity, and as I read it, so many people fainted, that after the reading, Chris Napolitano took my agent to the W Hotel across the street and said, Okay, how much do you want for this story? We've got to publish this that Chris recognized from the public reception, that people wanted a story that strong and that it it wasn't beyond the pale Chris. Chris was kind of preemptively assuming that the reader did not and would not tolerate something so strong. But then once he saw it in action, and he saw how young people really engaged with it, then Chris pulled out all the stops and he published the story. It's funny, too. A side note. On that same evening, years later, I pitched a television series to HBO, and the head of programming acquisition was this very lovely, late 20s woman, maybe early 30s, and she said that her boyfriend had drug her to that reading that night, and Her boyfriend had fainted, and she was so impressed that that's why, now that she was head of programming for HBO, she wanted to meet me, and she brought me in for that pitch session because she wanted some connection and some completion after having seen her boyfriend faint at the Union Square Barnes and Noble on that very same night. So yeah, it was just the whole thing was a big cluster fuck.

Michael David Wilson 14:05
And in terms of people fainting, there are a lot of different things going on within the story. There's the initial challenge to take a deep breath and to hold that and you're, you're told up front, you know, as you are in the latest book of yours, you know, this is what's happening, and you're being instructed to do something. But at the same time, you've got this up and down in terms of comedy and in terms of horror and in terms of shock throughout the story, which is then going to lend itself to people having this reaction. Did you know or did you suspect that people would actually faint while reading the story, and if not, when you saw it happening? Did you then kind of play up to it and think, okay, there are other ways that we can incite this.

Chuck Palahniuk 15:09
You know, I had no idea people would faint because before the first public reading where we had our first fainter, I had read it once in the workshop to my friends, and my friends had felt kind of brutalized by the story, but they had laughed, and they had been especially grateful for that. There's a final payoff laugh at the end, yeah, and I just remember them being completely exhausted by the end of those 11 pages. It's a relatively short story, but then the first night I read it, the combination of the room being so crowded and people having no idea what they were going to hear just seemed to work. And a young man in the very back of this big crowd fainted. And then after that, it was there were almost no events where one or more people didn't faint, and that sort of that command at the beginning, speaking in the imperative, breathe in, inhale, take in as much air as you possibly can. This story should last for about as long as you can, hold your breath. So listen as fast as you can. And so when I say, listen as fast as you can, we don't think of listening as an active thing that we can do. Listen as fast as you can is kind of a Zen koan. Is kind of a paradox, which I talk about in shock induction, because a Zen koan engages the rational part of your mind in something that doesn't make sense, that's not in an irrational task. What is the sound of one hand clapping? What is a the opposite of a victimless crime? You want a Zen Cohen like listen as fast as you can, because it engages and confuses the prefrontal cortex, though suddenly the mind is kind of thrown into confusion, and you're instantly placed in that sort of pre hypnotic, suggestible state. And so listen as fast as your as you can is much more powerful than just the hold your breath part. And then at that that point, I read the beginning as fast as I possibly can while staying articulate. A friend of mine when he's 13 years old, he heard all about pegging. Pegging. Pegging is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Rumor is that if you stimulate the prostate gland fast enough, then you can stimulate explosive, hands free orgasms. I read that first part, which is very visceral and very explicit. I read it really quickly to kind of put people on the edge of their seats, and then I slow down as we go into the man buying the carrot, and he realizes how it's going to look that lowly carrot and the jar of Vaseline rolling down the conveyor belt and everybody seeing the big evening he has in mind. So my friend, my friend, he goes and he buys milk and sugar and eggs and a carrot and a jar of Vaseline, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And so it's the combination of reading it very quickly to make people sit forward and listen very closely, and then reading it very slowly so that people are hanging hanging on every word that that kind of keeps them constantly present, and it builds up the tension that you can cut with a laugh, like he's going to put a carrot cake up his ass. That gets the huge laugh. And so it's a matter of sort of slowly building up tension with different devices and then cutting it with a joke, so that suddenly everyone relaxes for an instant, and then you go back into narrative scene. I'll leave it at that. I've talked a lot at this point,

Michael David Wilson 19:11
and I found even with the part where he decides, right, I've got to actually buy the ingredients for a carrot cake that that is something very relatable. It's kind of the box of porn in the woods. Everyone has a story. Everyone has a moment where you know that they know what they're doing, they know what they're buying, but they don't necessarily need the entire supermarket too. So they start adding other things to the order, and

Chuck Palahniuk 19:46
it's confusing shame in a very funny way, right?

Michael David Wilson 19:49
Yes, which is, of course, at the whole center of this story. It is about shame. It is about things that are unsaid, which. Kind of brings us to what happens to the carrot. You know, when you know the kid has gone to have his dinner and he comes back and there is no carrot. This is the invisible carrot,

Chuck Palahniuk 20:18
and no one will acknowledge the carrot, and so in a way, the entire story is about these things that no one will acknowledge. Right up to the coup de grace of the story is when the narrator himself is forced to chew through his own colon and he says, If I told you how I'm not going to tell you what it was like, but if I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever eat calamari. And so that, that statement of, we're not going to go there. The first rule of fight club is, you don't talk about fight club. I think the literary term is apacio. It's about saying the things that we're not going to say, defining the things that we're not going to say, defining the places we're not going to go, and then doing that as a way of going there, of introducing those topics. And so this constant sort of refusal to recognize things, it also forces the reader to make that final connection. And it's throughout the story the reader has to make the final connection. At each sort of broken incomplete the reader has to realize what took place there. So it forces the reader to put the final piece in the puzzle at every single one of those junctions.

Michael David Wilson 21:47
And I mean talking about the pieces of the puzzle, let's talk about the genesis of guts and the pieces of guts, because you've got three stories that part of a wider piece. And then, of course, I mean, you've got guts itself a year or so later being part of haunted so another much more expensive piece, I wonder when you originally envisioned guns, did you know that it will become part of a bigger story, or was it initially envisioned as a standalone?

Chuck Palahniuk 22:32
You know, very first and foremost, a million years ago, I had read about how when Shirley Jackson published the lottery in the New Yorker. There was outrage that The New Yorker, the magazine that prided itself on being for the most elite, most enlightened, most intellectual people in the world. It wasn't for little old ladies in Dubuque, The New Yorker that was so snobby about its its sophistication that when it published the lottery, an enormous number of subscribers canceled their subscriptions, and people were outraged, and people wrote bales of hate mail to the New Yorker and to Shirley Jackson, and it just kind of proved the hypocrisy of this magazine that held itself up as the most sophisticated publication in the world, and suddenly Shirley Jackson is showing just how provincial they are, just how naive they are. And so I wanted to write a story that would do the Shirley Jackson lottery thing is, I love Shirley Jackson, and I wanted to make Shirley Jackson proud. So I thought, What is the story that I could write right now that would be the equivalent of the Shirley Jackson lottery that would be so confronting that even people who felt that they were open minded and sophisticated and intellectual, even they would be deeply confronted by that story, and they would cancel their subscriptions to the Guardian, and they would cancel their subscriptions to Playboy, yeah. And that became guts. And

Michael David Wilson 24:20
the interesting thing is, and you alluded to it earlier, and we mentioned it a little off air, but actually the more extreme details, much like you did with not forever, but for now, you don't actually write them in. You take us right up until that point. So a lot of our mind is having to fill in, you know, the actual biting, the way that he saves himself, he frees himself. But you know, you've got the detail about. Calamari. And you've also, very briefly beforehand, got the infamous part about packing a lamb skin condom with peanut butter. And I did actually wonder, when I got to that, I thought that might be the part where people are fainting because it's getting towards the end of the story. But it is just a something about that combination at that moment, you know you, if you want to feel your intestines, that you've gone back to the instructional as well. Well, for

Chuck Palahniuk 25:40
a lot of those readings, I was reading in the comments, company of the publicist named Oh David. I can't think of his last name. He was a West Coast publicist I worked with a great deal, and he said that the fainting always started when I said corn and peanuts, because there's that moment of confusion when he is somehow connected to the bottom of the swimming pool drain, and he's assuming that it's a sea serpent that is, some animal that's been living in the drain that has latched on to him. And then when he realizes that he's kind of floating in this, this soup of blood and sperm and shit. It's that sort of soup image. And then you can, and it's also in the imperative, you can see corn and peanuts. And once I say corn and peanuts. People with the audience would drop like flies, and David said that's what they would always faint corn and peanuts, because it's like the ultimate confirmation that forces them to recognize what's taking place, that this this person's bowels have ruptured, and the corn and peanuts are so associated with fecal matter, and so they're forced to realize that the character's bowels have ruptured. And at that realization, which I have not stated out right, I haven't put it in language, I forced them to make that connection. Boom, down they go. It is a weird, fascinating, little hypnotic thing that happens there.

Bob Pastorella 27:26
And I would think that it would come up to me, it would come up when you have the mention of the 400 pounds of pressure,

Chuck Palahniuk 27:34
but that's an abstract but

Bob Pastorella 27:37
that that like the initial time that I read guts years ago, that's what, what made me go, oh, oh, I have an idea. Oh, and I don't like this idea. I don't like this idea in my head. I don't like it. And it's, and it's, and then you, you, you confirm my idea. And I'm like, Oh no, no, no, no. So it was like, that would to me, that was the initial gross out, because that's a lot of pressure. And then the thing that that made my stomach flip was the corn and peanuts. I was like, well, yep, okay, I'm getting that taste in my mouth now, and I didn't, I didn't, you know, obviously, didn't pass out, but I did get that, that real visceral bile in the back of the throat, sensation that's not good.

Chuck Palahniuk 28:35
The the real power starts in the hospital scene where the one character has inadvertently created this enormous kidney stone by putting wax up his urethra. And when I talk about you can, they're talking about it in the abstract. They're looking at an x ray. And on that X ray, again, the imperative, you can see a long, thin V of wax folded sideways, and it's bump. It's is gap rapidly gathering crystals of calcium carbonate, and is ripping up this bumping around, ripping up the soft lining of the bladder. And once I get into kind of unpacking that imagery, the audience, just with there would be an enormous moan of misery. This is hideous moan of recognition and misery. And as a kidney stone sufferer, I love that, because I just wanted to make the world's biggest kidney stone and stick it in a person. And it's a true story that happened to a friend of mine in college. He ended up paying so much for the medical bills that he dropped out and we never saw him again. It was a friendship where he was so humiliated by having suffered that that he just dropped out and moved far. Way, and he was lost to us. So it was, it was a way of resolving that story for myself, and of, you know, having a kidney stone joke to depic my own suffering. And and it works. It really makes the audience suffer.

Michael David Wilson 30:20
Yeah, and I love that you've got this misdirection because you've got the line. It's after dinner when the kids guts start to hurt. So at that moment you feel okay. This is the big guts moment. No, no, no, no, no. This is the prelude. We have got something much bigger coming

Chuck Palahniuk 30:42
well, and there's a nice trick in the whole story. There's something that's a technique I was taught at the very beginning of my training as a writer, and that was the distinction of submerging the I. A very good writer told me that it's more powerful if you write in the first person, but then you submerge the I you introduce the fact that, let me tell you about a friend of mine, a friend of mine when he was 13 years old. And so we're announcing, in an offhand way, that it's going to be first person, but then for almost the entire story, it's about a friend of mine, a friend of mine. It's about all these other people. The camera is kept away from the narrator, and is only after the audience is completely enrolled in the story that we eventually come back to the narrator story, which is a swimming pool story. And again, that is something that Mr. James does constantly. He's almost every story starts with as an anti Aquarian. I meet these people, they tell me these stories. And so he introduces the story in first person, without explaining who he is, and then he proceeds to tell someone else's story. And so this submerging the I is a way of keeping the camera elsewhere until you want to bring it to exactly when what to bring it to, because people are kind of alienated by the first person. They don't want to hear the story about how you did this thing. And so you can charm the charm them much more effectively if you tell them a kind of secondhand story about somebody else and then eventually bring it around for yourself.

Bob Pastorella 32:31
Yeah, I seen that in I recognize that in David Lynch's some of his films, especially Wild at Heart when uh, Laura Dern character talks about her cousin Dell and how she, you it's her voice. And, you know, she's narrating this story to sailor. But it's not about her, it's about cousin Dell, and then, but it all comes back to something that affected her, you know. And I didn't know what it was called until after I'd read some stuff that you had said about submerging the I, and it's like, it clicked. I was like, Oh, wow, they can. You can do it in a film narrative too. And I always thought that was interesting. It's hard to it's it's hard to do, but I think the best first person stories are ones that is someone telling you about their experience with someone else,

Chuck Palahniuk 33:31
which is the Bible, the Gospels, if Jesus had told you how great he was, Hi, my name is Jesus. I'm great. Would you bother? No. And Fight Club was entirely submerging the I because it was a book about Tyler Durden told by somebody in the way that the apostles talked about Christ. And so you're going to believe, you know you're going to believe Nick Carraway when he tells you that Jay Gatsby was great. Because Nick Carraway had written a book called The Great Nick Carraway, you wouldn't read it. But there is something so sweet and so loving when you have a narrator talking about someone they love or someone they admire, that that is such a generous act that is instantly seductive to the reader. The reader wants to hear you loving somebody. My two friends, the carrot kid and the candle kid, they both grew up. They both got big, but I have never weighed more than I did that day, so it's redemptive for the two friends. They moved on with their lives, but I'm still that 85 pound, 13 year old that I was when I had my mishap. I have not moved on with my life, and so it's a tragedy in the same way that Gatsby is a tragedy Nick Carraway. Nick Carraway is forever. Stunted by what he went through. He will always be that person who came home from the East Coast broken hearted, but mine is just more

Michael David Wilson 35:12
visceral, right? The other two characters have the invisible character, but the narrator, he is visibly scarred. He is physically affected. And I mean, I'm wondering so the first two stories you heard from friends of yours, what were the ingredients for the third story?

Chuck Palahniuk 35:39
When I was writing my book Chuck, which is about sexual compulsion. I was going to sex aholics Anonymous, and there was a guy who was so thin, and I'm always so fascinated how people stay fit later in life. And I just asked him on a break, how are you so fit? And he said I had a radical bowel resection. And I said, what is that? And he told me basically the swimming pool story and how it so damaged his large intestine that he had. He has a very shortened intestinal system, and he's a sexual compulsive and he's got an incredibly low body fat because he just can't digest very much food. And so that, really, that was the the finishing piece of that puzzle that I needed to make those first two stories into a story as kind of a three act or three verse song that started, it's basically escalating a premise. The premise is sexual experimentation, stories gone wrong. And we start with the most innocuous one, and we move to one that's a little more outrageous and challenging. And then if people are still on board, we can go full out and we can tell them the one they don't want to hear, but by that point, they don't have a choice. So there were three true stories. The last one did come through a support group. There is another aspect in there of this unrecognized unspeakableness is I have a huge library of forensic investigative textbooks that are typically written for police detectives and medical examiners and coroners. And there used to be a bookstore on lower market street in San Francisco called Stacey's. Their entire basement was forensic textbooks and medical textbooks, and I loved Stacey's. So all of these books that had been about examining murder sites and death scenes, they all did a big about face and added an extra chapter in the late 80s and early 90s, because in the 80s, they thought that there was a big explosion in teen suicides. All these teenage boys hung themselves, and so there was a big push to investigate all these suicides by teenage boys. But by the late 80s and early 90s, the police had recognized that they weren't suicides. They were auto erotic asphyxiations where the parents had come in they found their beloved child dead, and they'd actually in this scene of pathos before they called the police. They would clean up the murder. They would clean up the misadventure site. They would remove all traces of semen and pornography, and they would sometimes actually put clothes on their dead child while the child was still hanging there. And the pathos of that was so heartbreaking that that became kind of a passage in guts, because it was the ultimate statement of what could not be said, what the parents were going to hide before they let the world know the truth about their child. It was just the ultimate sharing of shame by both the parent and the child. I found it so incredibly heartbreaking and painful that it had to be there years ago, back in the 19 early 80s, there was one of these giant porn superstores in Portland, and they had a video arcade, and apparently there was a private room in this arcade that you could Rent and watch porn, and some teenage boy went in and he rented that room, and he was watching porn, and a fire broke out, and he died trying to get out of this arcade maze of porno booths, and he was overcome by smoke and ultimately burned to death. And it was a big local scandal, but. I couldn't help but really feel this enormous empathy and pathos for the parents to have the death of their child made front page news that their child had died in this very sordid circumstance, and the child had been overcome by smoke while watching pornography in this rented space. Every aspect of that story was just heartbreaking. And so it was so much of that pathos that I wanted to bring to guts, and so that is kind of woven in along with the auto erotic asphysiation. I didn't want to make the story about that, but I wanted that to be present in the story.

Michael David Wilson 40:46
Yeah, that particular detail about the kids and the auto erotic asphyxiation that comes between story one and story two. And so what I noticed is you're putting these things in that just make it harder and harder to then laugh at the jokes that will inevitably come later. So you've got this dance, as I said before, between the dark and the comic, but when you put that detail in, it almost makes you feel uncomfortable or guilty to to laugh at anything that comes after, because it's such a heartbreaking thing. You've got another kind of double punch right at the end, with a detail to do with the dog that is absolutely heartbreaking. But then you throw a joke in, and it's like your brain, your your humanity, doesn't know how to handle it. You know, you're throwing too many things at once.

Chuck Palahniuk 41:53
Well, I think we misunderstand what we think of as funny, and funny we too often we think of it as something goofy, but funny really amounts to a break in tension, where you create tension and then you throw in something that kind of negates the drama of the tension, and you give people permission in that moment to laugh. And so often, I think that that is also driven by extreme sad. That's why people will so often have laughing fits at funerals. It's not because the funeral is funny, it's because you're feeling something so strong that's got to come out in some way, and that laughing is so similar to sobbing that they're kind of the same thing, and so I don't see laughter in guts as because something is funny. I see it as kind of a public form of crying. The people are much less likely to cry in public, so they're going to laugh instead of crying in the same way that maybe they're more comfortable laughing at a funeral than they would be crying in public.

Bob Pastorella 43:00
Yeah, it's the gallows Junior humor that, um, my, my dad's family is notorious for that when, for when I was growing up in the late 80s and 90s, we had, we had, it's a large family. We had several older people pass away, and so we had multiple funerals over the course of of two years. And it was always a thing that, you know, hey, it was an honor to be asked to be a pallbearer and so and they kind of sequester pallbearers, you know, during services away so they can be ready to move the casket and things like that. And that's when we heard the best damn jokes in the world. Because that was, you know, it was, it was almost like, hey, what do you got? You know? And we, we do that like you said. You have to diffuse the tension. Somehow we your your grief over a lost loved one is going to be hard, to hard to share sometimes, but laughter is easy to share. And so it kind of, it's, it was a, you know, it's a total break in tension, some good jokes, but yeah, I knew exactly where you're coming from

Chuck Palahniuk 44:21
there, especially among men. You get men together, and if you're not going to have a Joan Crawford movie, men are not going to cry together, but they are going to laugh together if you show them something that would otherwise make them cry, to recognize your own helplessness, to recognize your own powerlessness in the circumstance. Laughter is a socially acceptable way of men to do that.

Michael David Wilson 44:54
Yeah, it's interesting, because this is exactly how ideal with tragedy. And terrible things happening in my life, and I mean, a few years ago, I went through a really nasty divorce and child custody battle, and I didn't see my daughter for almost two years, but I could never really explain the situation to close friends without throwing some jokes in or adding some comedy. And there was nothing, you know, there's nothing actually funny about what happened. But I felt like, goodness, I need to break the tension. I need to throw some humor in. Otherwise, it's just, it's just sad, it's just too dark. I can't tell, you know, that story, I can't tell that real life event without breaking the tension, without adding humor. And you know, you're absolutely right. This is how we deal with things. And yeah, I wonder now if this is more common to men, as you, as you pointed out, you

Chuck Palahniuk 46:07
know, one of my favorite books is called heartburn. It was a novel written by Nora Ephron. It was her fictionalizing her incredibly messy divorce from Carl Bernstein, and she is pregnant with her second child. She realizes her husband has been having a long term affair. He wants he doesn't want a divorce. He wants to continue to deceive this other woman while they remain married. And this woman is the narrator, Nora Ephron is more or less publicly humiliated, and her heart is broken, and she's thrown through so much turmoil, but it is one of the funniest books you will read in your life right through to the end. And at the end, she talks about why people say, Why do you make everything into a story? Why do you make everything into a joke? And she gives this fantastic lecture at the end of heartburn about why she wants people to laugh with her, because it shows she has a control over the situation. And I won't spoil it, it is one of the most glorious parts of of a tragedy I've ever read that that compulsion to make tragedy funny, and in doing so, you you make it even more painful, because the reader or the witness isn't so it doesn't suffer so much that they shut down early. You allow them to accommodate more and more suffering by allowing them to periodically laugh, and then you expose them to more pain and more suffering, and ultimately, you get them to a place that they had no idea, that they had the strength to go there. And that's always the goal is to get yourself to that place. And in the case, when I was writing guts, I had to take Vicodin. I had Vicodin left over from a kidney stone. I knew this was going to be a one shot story. I was going to have to sit down and write the whole thing in one sitting. And so I just took a big Vicodin, I wrote the story. I took another big Vicodin, I finished the story, and that's the only way I could have written this story. But it's about charming people, so you can show them just how strong they can be.

Michael David Wilson 48:34
Once you had written the story, and you know you sent it to your editor or your agent? Did you make many changes? Did you make any changes? I'm just imagining being an editor and receiving this story, and it's like, what? What am I even going to say to that?

Chuck Palahniuk 48:57
Yeah, I made almost no changes whatsoever from the first draft to what you see in the book. And when I sent it off to my editor, my editor never even responded, and it wasn't until we were at that Union Square event and he said, Oh my gosh, there's a lot of people here. What are you going to read? I said, I think I'm going to read that gut story. And he was kind of confused. And then suddenly his face cleared, and he said, Oh, you're not going to read that horrible thing. You said to me, Oh, my God, you're not going to read that. He hadn't even given it another thought, because I think he'd read it once, and he'd been so put off by it that he thought that if he didn't respond, that would be the end of it. And the story, I would never revisit. The story, it would just die. It would go away. And then once he saw me again, read it in that context and see the effect it had on people, then I think he was a little more amenable. To that story, having a life as part of something longer. It was also in that same trip, I believe I was, I was invited to read at Columbia, and it's a big auditorium at Columbia University, and at least two young men, if not three, collapsed during the story, and one of these men's went into one of these men went into convulsions and started to shout this kind of inarticulate nonsense. And there was some documentary filmmakers there, and they captured all of this. But in the middle of this, my editor was sitting in the front row with his wife, who was very upper crust and very smart, and she turned to Jerry, my editor, and said, Please tell me that Random House is not legally liable for this. It was a melee until the ambulance got those three men out.

Michael David Wilson 50:52
Oh, my goodness. But I'll just

Chuck Palahniuk 50:56
add that historically, Charles Dickens was such a good reader, he was such a good presenter, and he had also studied hypnosis. So he could use his acting skill as well as his hypnosis skill to depict, I believe it's the death of Little Nell who hits her head on the side of a fireplace and dies. He could depict that scene in such a way that a fair number of people in the audience would always faint. And John Irving, when he wrote The Cider House Rules, Irving would read this kitchen table abortion scene that would make a certain portion of the audience always faint. So historically, there is precedent that with Cider House Rules and with Dickens, they had always had a fair number of people fainting. You

Michael David Wilson 51:47
said so much in that response. And one thing that occurred to me was your editor tried to make guts, your joint invisible carrot, but you didn't let him you brought it up.

Chuck Palahniuk 52:03
I didn't I just New York wasn't the first public reading. I read it in Portland a couple times, and I'd read it in San Francisco a couple times, and in every in every case, it was received really well. And in every case, someone fainted and the event was stopped, and that person was cared for and eventually recovered consciousness. And when they did so, it was like a resurrection. It was like seeing Lazarus come back from the dead, that the audience would just go crazy with euphoria. They thought that they had seen someone die in their midst. And now there was it was they were seeing someone come back from the dead. And I would always ask that the affected person, I would ask their permission before I would continue, and they would say, Yeah, I'm fine. And at that point, the audience would just be so charged with joy that they had seen someone come back from the dead and the whole rest of the event would just be this, this love fest, this carnival. So by the time I got the story to New York, I knew it worked, and so I wasn't as terrified as my poor editor and Playboy and my poor agent, and by the time I got the story to England, it had proved itself so much that the Guardian published it. And then the Guardian got a lot of nasty letters and cancelations so Oh, and then years later, a teacher in the New York Public School System put guts on a list of stories that were suggested as supplemental reading for honor students over the summer, and that teacher was suspended for at least a year for just having put the title of the story on a list of stories. So it goes,

Michael David Wilson 53:59
Yeah, I think you got your Shirley Jackson New York moment, which, as you said, was one of the things you intended. And I mean, when you look back now, did I mean to this day, do you still get any kind of hate or controversy because of guts, or have people accepted it much as they have the lottery that this is now part of the discourse, this is part of the canon of literature. Can we say that? I guess I just did say that it's not

Chuck Palahniuk 54:35
there yet. But it's kind of dazzles me how with it, with just with Fight Club, as innocuous as Fight Club seems now, for the past 10 years, 15 years, people have been on my back is they say the alt right has adopted Fight Club, and fight club is what got Donald Trump elected, and the Fight Club is this hideous in cell base. First plague on society. But then as soon as Luigi shot the United Healthcare guy in Manhattan two weeks ago, and everybody started to go online with hashtag. His name was Robert Paulson, and people on Tiktok were posting hundreds and 1000s of videos celebrating the shooter in terms of Fight Club as a radical act, then suddenly the right is attacking me and saying, look at all these fight clubs celebrating leftist killers who are celebrating the shooter. Fight Club is clearly an evil plague of the left and and has no place in polite society. So Fight Club has been sort of embraced and condemned by both the right and the left simultaneously. And I think it's only because guts is so strong that the public can't even recognize it enough to condemn it, because in order to condemn it and attack it and really trash it, they would first have to read it or listen to it, and they're not even going to go that far, which I think, in a way, is the ultimate goal. And horror is that you want to create something that people are really afraid of going into it. They're really afraid, can I endure this? Is this going to be too much for me? Am I going to be overwhelmed by this? And it's just a story. It's just, I think, 910, nine or 10 pages. But you want people to have that kind of trepidation is, I really don't feel that trepidation going into really any kind of horror anymore. I was gonna

Bob Pastorella 56:49
say it's it's got a reputation. There's people that that I've talked to that have never read it, and they're afraid to read it, and it's like, it's a story, it's not even that long, and they're like, Oh, I've heard about it. I don't want to be grossed out. I'm like, You should read it. And there, there's a fear there, they don't want to read it.

Chuck Palahniuk 57:11
I think that's incredible. I think that's wonderful, because that means that eventually they're going to have to read it. Yeah, it's, it's that whole imp of the perverse there's that whole Kierkegaard sphere that you stand on the cliff. And your fear comes from this longing to throw yourself over the cliff, that as long as you're aware of the cliff, it's always going to tempt you. Yeah, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 57:38
It's interesting how the ultimate goal really, then of the horror writer is to create the story that people cannot read. It feels like a paradox, but you know, what greater endorsement than to have written a story that cannot be read?

Chuck Palahniuk 57:56
You know. And again, going back to this idea of depicting with a metaphor the things that the people cannot face directly. Yeah, I think that's how the best horror always works.

Michael David Wilson 58:13
I think too that. I mean, when you were talking about the dickens readings and his background in hypnotism, it's like, Ah, so this is another reason why you got into hypnosis. It's not only going to help your understanding of people and of these techniques, but it's actually going to aid you as a writer and a public reader.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:42
And when I was in college, I worked for National Public Radio, and it was a great proving ground, sitting in that studio late at night and trying to tape your cart stories that you could make your voice do certain things. You could break it like Paul Harvey or Dr Laura Schlessinger, they would break their speech patterns in such a way that you weren't sure if your radio was broken and in it was kind of the device I used in shock induction when you're driving down the road. Suddenly a record would skip on the radio, and you weren't sure if the record was skipping, or if that was just part of the lyrics, this repetition and So creating that confusion, that undecidability was always part of kind of having an abnormal speech pattern on the radio. It made people like George Noory very easy to listen to, because they spoke in such a broken way that you'd be hanging on the on the sound of their voice. And so I think radio work helped me as a writer as well.

Michael David Wilson 59:49
Now we're coming up to the time that we have together today, but I would be remiss to not mention another aspect that you. Set up right at the start, and then you resolve at the end, involving the sister. Now, a lot of guts is believable and realistic. This might be, weirdly enough, the hardest to believe aspect, but as soon as you mentioned it, it's like, well, you have to go there, really. So when did this come into play, and was there any reluctance to to use this?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:00:34
You know, I really there needed to be something hugely at stake that I could get in as a suggestion, early, as a setup, and that I could pay off at the end, that in a way, this had to come to the death of something, something has to die in this story. And it's not the kid that dies, but it is the kid, the child that is inadvertently, that he inadvertently impregnates his sister with in this horrific, accidental, ludicrous way. And there was one case in Australia of a poorly chlorinated public pool and a virgin young woman, a girl, getting impregnated by sperm that was in this pool. And so historically, there was at least one case. And so I thought it was worth it. It was it was putting the big at stakeness there so that something would die at the end of the story. And that therapeutic abortion is the death that takes the story to death, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:01:43
oh, yeah. Well, this is undoubtedly the story in haunted that is most known, that has got the most attention over the years. But as I said at the start, you know, there's a lot of similarly controversial, difficult to digest stories. So I wonder, what is the story in haunted that you wish would get more attention?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:02:14
You know, the nightmare box really troubles people. People come away from haunted really shaken by the nightmare box. The Hot potting story was one that I found that people were really troubled by, people who had had any kind of a history of sexual abuse were really troubled by the Exodus story about the anatomically correct dolls. People would come to me in tears after that story. I just quit reading that in public, because it was just too upsetting for some people. People really marveled over the footwork story about people doing reflexology as a means of killing other people. People brought that to me, and they were just dazzled that two very unlikely things could be brought together, and that reflexology could be used in such an odd way. So that was a big story. Yeah, there was a lot, a lot of stories that each had their own reaction. The

Michael David Wilson 1:03:17
thing I love about the reflexology story is, when you start reading it, you feel like, Oh, this is something I gotta try. This is an interesting avenue to go down. And then by the time you get to the end of it, it's like, maybe I won't try that.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:03:37
You know, there's an old adage in writing they say when you don't know what happens next in the story, describe the inside of the character's mouth. And in lullaby, I use the soles of the character's feet. I have the character step on these very sharp things, because I know that that's a good way of creating a sympathetic physical reaction in the reader. The reader is always aware of what the sole of their feet feel like. And so in the reflexology story, talking about reflexology and having the bottoms of your foot touched is a very is a very effective way of getting in under the radar and getting people very sympathetically involved in the story.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:22
Well, thank you so much for chatting with us for an hour about this amazing story gaps. Yeah, we've spoken for so long about gaps that people could have read it about five times in the in the length of the podcast. But yeah, we hugely appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, and we can't wait to hear what you have next. What do you have next? What are you working on?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:04:53
I'd like to say that I wish Shirley Jackson had had an outlet like this, where Shirley Jackson could. Just unapologetically say, I engineered that story. This is how it works. Just another aside is that Edgar Allan Poe has a great essay about how he engineered the Raven, and how about he made every single choice in terms of never more, had to have three syllables. It had to have these certain vowel sounds that that story is not just this kind of airy fairy inspiration that came to him. The story is engineered like architecture that he made very scientific choices in exactly how we put it together and exactly what words are used. And I think that writers, they're done a disservice when their work isn't taken on that kind of empirical and analytical level. And I wish that Shirley Jackson had had the opportunity to write an essay similar to what we're doing here, and similar to what Poe did for the Raven, where she could have just very clearly said, I made these choices for these reasons. The story is structured in this way for this reason, and being able to sort of explicitly demonstrate just how smart she was. You

Michael David Wilson 1:06:23
know, I've just had a moment that's almost staircase with adjacent and that is a question that I wanted to get to. So if you have the time, just briefly, I mean, you've spoken before about mixing the first second and third person within stories, something that I think writers struggle with the most, and the tense that people can get rung the most is the second person. So I wonder if you have any advice in terms of how to write effectively in the second person, or equally, if there are times when you should absolutely avoid it, I would

Chuck Palahniuk 1:07:09
say you can write in the second person, but to avoid in the same way when you write in the first person, to to submerge the I, to not say the I, if Anything, say me or my a friend of mine, a friend of mine says you were writing in the first person, but at the same time it's hiding it by saying mine instead of I or me. And so the mistake in second person is when you say you, you're, you're entering the domain of the unknown that the classic Rod Serling opening for Twilight Zone, it's always you, you, you. And in the same way that the I becomes tiresome, the you becomes really tiresome. So instead of saying you are opening up a door, you are holding your breath. Just say, hold your breath. Walk forward, open the door, step through the doorway. Don't say you. Don't say you. Step through the doorway. Hide the you in the same way that you would hide the I. And you can write in the second person, imperative, much more effectively without getting caught. Just don't get caught.

Michael David Wilson 1:08:25
Fantastic advice. Thank you so much. Do you have any final thoughts you could leave our listeners and viewers with?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:36
Wow, I pontificated quite a bit, so I'm going to call it good, but I'm thrilled that horror seems to be coming back so enormously strong. A friend of mine tells me that you cannot buy vintage paperback horror anymore because Grady Hendricks incredible book paperbacks from Hell has made those books fantastic collector's items, and those books are selling for a small fortune, and those books are now being reprinted with the original covers. So books like let's go play at the Adams's are now back on the shelves, and you can read those appalling books from the 1970s I find all of that incredibly thrilling. So my editor in New York tells me that right now, the market is split between horror and romance, that if people aren't buying romance or buying horror, and if they're not buying horror, they're buying romance. I find that wonderful, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:09:34
and I love that you reference. Let's go play at the Adams. Because, of course, let's go play at the Adams and the girl next door by Jack Ketchum. They're both based on the same case, but Jack Ketchum wrote The Girl Next Door about a decade later, and up until recently, nobody knew about let's go play at the Adams by Mendel Johnson. And, but it's kind of got a resurgence. And, well, I guess Grady Hendrix is one of the people to thank for that. And, yeah, I love that. Previously, these books that had had almost become valueless, you know, you could buy them for $1 at the second hand store, because, you know, nobody saw the value they have now, their stock has risen, as you say, their collector's items. I love that that has happened.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:10:32
And it's only when people look at those old, expired metaphors that they're able to come with, come up with a metaphor that's going to work for us now. You know, what is the metaphor that is going to express all the horror that we feel about what we can't talk about right now in history? And so those books are going to expose us to all these metaphors so that we can start to examine a new metaphor.

Michael David Wilson 1:10:57
Well, thank you, as always, for talking about the things that cannot be talked about on This Is Horror. Thank you.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:11:07
Thank you.

Michael David Wilson 1:11:12
There you go. 600 episodes of This Is Horror Podcast, and 12 years. Where do we go from here we go the only direction I know, which means we go up. We release more episodes, more often. We get better, we do better, and we seek to bring you the absolute best offer conversation show on the planet. That is the mission. That is what me and Bob are trying to do. So tell your friends and spread the word, because we are. This Is Horror, and we're only just getting started. Okay? Advert break time coming

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Michael David Wilson 1:12:56
that about does it for another episode of This Is horror to support the podcast, become a patron at patreon.com forward slash, This Is Horror. You can submit questions to future interviewees and get early access to episodes. To support me and my dot comedy writing and books, go to patreon.com forward slash. Michael David Wilson, you get to ask questions on writing and life, and I narrate my books in their entirety as part of live garage recordings. You're also the first to get MDW book news. And if you want to leave a review for the podcast, the best place to do so is the Apple podcast site. So that is it for another episode of This Is Horror. I'm Michael David Wilson, this has been This Is Horror. So until next time, take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror, keep on writing and have a Great, great day.