The Portland-based novelist has been hammering out a book a year since the mid-90s, carving out a niche for himself as a latter day Vonnegut-ian moralist-cum-satirist. But post-9/11, Palahniuk reckoned it was all over for transgressive tales of angry young saboteurs, so in the tradition of ‘Stepford Wives’/‘Rosemary’s Baby’ author Ira Levin, he devoted his attentions to rehabilitating and subverting the horror genre with yarns like ‘Lullaby’ and ‘Diary’. His new book ‘Haunted’, described as a ‘novel of short stories’, is the third part of the horror trilogy (he says science fiction is next), and has already gained notoriety by way of its opening story ‘Guts’, a sphincter-tightening tale of masturbation-gone-horribly-wrong.

On his last promotional tour, Palahniuk read ‘Guts’ every night, and every night there were casualties, men and women turning pale, sweating and slumping to the floor as he read. As the body count mounted, the situation began to resemble the plot of his fifth novel ‘Lullaby’, whose central conceit concerned an ancient African culling song with the power to kill. (For the full story, read Palahniuk’s letter to booksellers at www.haunted-thebook.com).

Palahniuk reckons the ‘Guts’ body count has reached 69, although he rarely performs the story anymore because most people have read it on the Internet.

‘Guts’ isn’t even the most hardcore thing in ‘Haunted’, by far his most challenging (and occasionally patience-trying) book yet. Rather than anthologising stand-alone yarns, Palahniuk wove together 23 stories he’d harvested over the years into a tapestry akin to what Robert Altman did with Ray Carver’s stories in ‘Short Cuts’. So why the unorthodox structure?

“Y’know one very big obvious reason is that too often you have book reviews with plot summaries,” Palahniuk says, “almost like children’s book reports at school, and it’s heartbreaking to read a book review that gives away the entire plot of the novel. It doesn’t serve anybody and it puts people off. So I thought, ‘Why not put so much plot in a book that there is no way a book reviewer could spoil it for the reader?’ That was big challenge, to present so much ongoing drama that people will burn out on it, flatline on it, and short-circuit drama, not just on the page but in their lives.”

Plus, in more practical terms, shorts and novellas are a hard sell.

“Publishers don’t want short story collections,” he admits. “They always complain about them, so putting them all together was a way to do what I wanted to do, but keep the publisher happy too.”

The device Palahniuk employs to quilt all these stories together takes the form of a creepy writer’s retreat where the participants simultaneously try to out-do each other’s confessions and also sabotage their own survival in order to up the drama quotient. It ties together classical allusions – ‘The Decameron’, ‘The Canterbury Tales’, Byron and the Shelleys in the Villa Diodati – with dog-eat-dog reality TV shows, the contestants constantly imagining how their predicament will play better on television, to their own detriment.

“It’s not so much a parody of reality television, but much deeper,” says Palahniuk, “it’s more the idea of what their reality is. Right now with the Internet and talk radio, so many different media outlets, everybody is constantly reinterpreting reality for us.’

Palahniuk’s resistance to information-overload dates back to when he was writing the initial drafts of ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Invisible Monsters’ a decade ago in Portland, in a house with no TV reception.

“I moved to a place outside the city on the wrong side of a mountain,” he recalls. “There was no radio, no television, at the time there was no Internet. I had nothing but books and maybe recorded music. And that’s all I had for about four to five years, and I really haven’t gone back to television since then. (When there’s a television on) you don’t really hold a narrative in your head, you don’t really tell stories, you’re always being subjected to other people’s reality; you don’t get to craft your own. You can’t gather together all the details if you’re always being washed and douched by the radio music or radio talk, all these other people imposing their stories on you.”

Consequently, Palahniuk’s books reach what is commonly regarded as a dead demographic in the book business: young males. Part of this is the subject matter, but it’s also due to the hyper-realistic, visceral nature of his prose.

“It helps if you’re writing books to think: ‘What is the real strength of books, what film and music can’t do’,” he says. “I can do things in books that movies could never ever do ’cos they’d cost too much to make. Movies are passive, people may or may not want to see them, but with a book you have a private consensual audience of one person and that person has to make an ongoing effort to get through the story. And it costs so little to produce. That’s the strength of books.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.