Chuck Palahniuk does nasty things to his readers

Posted on May 4, 2005 by Chris Mitchell

From Chuck's About The Author page for his book Haunted:

"Standing people, according to my translator in Italy, they just dropped, disappearing in the crowd. In Bologna, where an actor read "Guts" in Italian, the listening crowd was riddled with holes, empty spaces where people had fallen and lay on the stone floor. "Do you know," the translator said, "this awful story is being read in a Cathedral?"

In the auditorium of the Beverly Hills library in Los Angeles, a woman near the rear of the hall screamed and screamed for paramedics and an ambulance, crying so hard that her red blouse looked soaked with blood. Just her tears. As her husband twitched on the floor. In the men's bathroom, where another man escaped the story, as he bent to splash cold water on his face, he fainted, cracking his head on the sink.

In Kansas City, another man stepped outside during the reading, escaping to get some air and fainted, splitting his lip on the sidewalk. In Las Vegas, where the county library filled its two auditoriums with people who wanted to hear, one man had a seizure in the theater where I read. In the second room, watching by closed-circuit video, two more people fainted. In Chicago, where the city library filled two theaters, two people also fainted in the room watching the story on a video monitor. One of those people waited to say hello at the end of the three-hour book signing, his face still dirty red with dried blood from biting his own lower lip in half. A seizure he didn't remember, during a reading he'd never forget.

Until that tour, I'd only heard rumors about people fainting from stories they heard. Most occurred while Charles Dickens read the murder scene from Oliver Twist. That strangulation scene would send corseted Victorian ladies spiraling to the floor. In recent history, women have fainted while John Irving read a kitchen table abortion scene from his novel Ciderhouse Rules."

There's a lot, lot more where that came from. Fascinating stuff. The story that had such a huge physical effect on people is called "Guts". It's in the new book Haunted, which is a "novel made up of 23 stories". Does it have a sticker on the front saying "Take the Chuck Palahniuk Challenge - we dare you to get from end to the other of this book without collapsing" ?

There's an extensive site to support Haunted. although it has an irritating Flash intro with no way to skip it. And Chuck has separate websites for each of his books, that give the back story, how and why he wrote it, links - great stuff. See choke-book.com and lullaby-book.com for starters.

[UPDATE: It would help if I could spell Palahniuk - Jesus. Corrected now. Sorry.]