chuck’s ‘guts’
I loved the movie Fight Club (one of my all-time favorites), which is based on a book of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. It was an extremely well-acted and well-written story that made some very interesting observations on consumerism and the state of American culture today, and as well as had some very dark humor and shocking scenes. I’ve seen it over and over during the past several years, and it always entertains. So now every time I see or hear the name “Chuck Palahniuk”, I pay attention.
So I was reading Boing Boing a few weeks ago, and I saw a post about an NPR interview with Chuck. So I downloaded the interview from the link and listened to it over a few days (it was 45 minutes long). It gave a lot of insight into how he writes and approaches stories, what his mindset is and what his motivations are. One thing he mentioned was as short story from his new book, Haunted, called “Guts”, that he reads often on his book tour. Apparently, whenever he reads it, people seem to faint because of the horror. Now I found that hard to believe, but I was curious, so I found a website that had the story and read it. Now I didn’t pass out, but I’d be hard pressed to find a better combination of “imaginative”, “disgusting”, and “horrifying” in any other story in all of literature. It’s certainly not for the easily-sickened or faint-hearted, but entertaining nonetheless. Needless to say I just bought a copy of Haunted, so we’ll see how many other stories like that it has. I’ll just make sure I don’t eat before reading it.