Whither the Chuckster?

My fondness for the novels of Chuck Palahniuk was once so profound the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster referred to him as my boyfriend.



As my friend Alex Pallix noted when she posed for this same picture with the author, 'I was hoping for a boob-grab.'

A few years ago, I wrote a fan letter to Chuck, in fact. This is a thing I've only done twice, the other time being a love note to Tabasco in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

But where Tabasco just sent me a marketing package, Chuck Palahniuk personally responded to my letter. This was during a window where he promised to answer all letters sent through his agent. And his response was indeed personal. Included along with a letter answering my specific questions was a bevy of autographed novelty items, an autographed trade paperback of Fight Club, and most stunning a necklace. Made of semiprecious stones and beads that spell out 'For Rod McBride from Chucky P.'

Everyone who wrote that month got such a reply, and it took him several months to do it. Very cool.

And I did a lot of workshopping back in the day at the Cult, and even after I quit that part I hug out there a lot before the tragic decision to 'upgrade' the site to Drupal, a decision that was an upgrade only in the way that Castro taking power in Cuba was an upgrade. Everything about the move sucked, so naturally it was decided there was no going back. I miss the friends I had there, but so it goes.

None of which is what I started this post to rant about.

I remember some fans at the Cult didn't like Lullaby or Diary, and everyone there seemed to have one of his books they liked to hate. For me it was Invisible Monsters. I read it, but it was a struggle to hang with it.

Still, Survivor is a dessert island pick, a novel I re-read on more or less an annual basis. I have an autographed hardback and an autographed trade paperback because I got nervous loaning my hardback, and it's a book I have to loan to anyone who will try it. And I adore Lullaby, Choke, and yeah, Fight Club.

Then came Haunted. And it was like our favorite author had let a particularly obnoxious fart that no one wanted to acknowledge. The short stories were solid, and more than one person besides myself said it would have been a great little short story collection if you stripped away the garbage 'novel' connective material and the excrementally bad 'poetry.'

But those short stories, some of those were downright awesome.

Rant, well... I didn't like Invisible Monsters, so so maybe this is another fluke. It was bad stuff, nothing really to recommend it unless you really enjoy tampon jokes.

So now comes Snuff. And if it's possible, it's worse than Rant. It's like Haunted without the short stories.

I think when Chuck was coming up, workshopping a lot, he got a lot of constructive criticism. And he was willing to take it. His agent, his editor, and the people in Tom Spanbauer's workshop all told him when what he was doing wasn't working.

After Choke, though, he was NYT best-seller guy, how much criticism is his editor going to offer after that? Or his agent? And because he's been on that list, there's a momentum there. They'll promote his books heavily and that'll put him on the bestseller list again. Maybe he won't win many new readers over, but there's enough chumps like me who loved a few of his early books to take a chance on his latest.

Plus, as long as they can manage to keep the hype up, there's pressure to come up with a new novel every year, whether the author has any ideas or not. Which is a damned shame, because I'm sure he has another good book in him if he'd step back and work like he did when he wrote Survivor, back when he was a diesel mechanic with writerly ambitions.