Ask Chuck: Prescient or Lucky?

A Question From Billy S

Billy S asks:

I don’t exactly expect this to get to the man himself, but I have to ask— Rant is largely about a pandemic, Fight Club came out before 9/11, and Adjustment Day was written well before the January 6th attack. How does Chuck seem to keep his finger on the pulse of the world? I doubt you could’ve printed Adjustment Day this year¹.

Hello Billy,

You don’t know the half of it. My father was shot and killed almost on the day the Fight Club movie was originally set to be released. My mother died in a scene almost identical to the mother’s death in Choke². My brother and two sisters aren’t joking when they ask me to never write a book in which a brother or sister dies. I guess my brother has never read Survivor.

One explanation is my method. To test a premise I take it to everyone I can, to see if they engage with the idea, and to hear if they have personal experiences that will help flesh out the core idea. That said, each book snowballs with the input of a zillion people so it’s more likely to collect some zeitgeist. That’s putting the chicken first.

If I want to put the egg first, I’d propose that my fiction provides a social model that people want to replicate. After Invisible Monsters launched, realtors had to advise home sellers to hide their prescription drugs. After Choke, a man in Florida³ was arrested for pretending to choke next to attractive women and then trying to coerce them into giving him the Heimlich Maneuver. Likewise, Payne Stewart and five others died in a plane crash eerily similar to the crash depicted in Survivor which had been published only a few weeks before. Still, I think that’s claiming too much influence⁴. Sheer coincidence.

Another possibility is that history repeats itself. People had been imploding buildings long before I wrote Fight Club. My goal is to write something that initially seems ludicrous, but that lingers in people’s memory. And if a story sticks around long enough the chances are that some real-life event will occur that seems to echo it.

That’s not to say I can’t work some magic. If you don’t subscribe... Just kidding. Or not.

1. Billy’s question came through the Cult website chuckpalahniuk.net. For the immediate future please submit questions there. I’ll be interacting via the comment section, some. One day I’ll iron out a smoother way to solicit questions for the newsletter. Okay? Okay.

2. For some unknown reason I knew Victor’s mother had to choke on chocolate pudding. Editors pushed me to make it green pistachio pudding, I guess for better comic effect. But I stuck with the red-brown image I had in my head. As they shot the movie, Anjelica Huston had to be cleaned up and made up fresh for each take. She confronted me off the set, her face smeared with pudding and said, “You!” Pointing to the mess, she said, “You did this to me!” She was joking, but still, she was a trooper. And the pudding looked… perfect, somehow. And this is the spooky part. The morning I found my mother dead from cancer, her mouth was filled to overflowing with red-brown “purge” fluids. This is typical in death, fluid from the lungs and/or stomach back up into the mouth after a couple hours. And it looked exactly like the image I’d always had of Victor’s dead mother. Over the phone the 9-1-1 operator insisted I attempt mouth-to-mouth, but I could not. My face would only end up looking like Paige Marshall’s, smeared with that cold blood.

3. Of course, Florida.

4. No shit, but on Discord my students call me “Nostradamus.” But never to my face.