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Chuck Palahniuk tells Adam Lee Davies why we all love the idea of Armageddon

It hardly seems like nine years since David Fincher’s divisive film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s first novel, Fight Club, smeared the author’s unchecked worldview across the collective consciousness. A breathless tale of anarchist soap salesmen, underground boxing clubs and Nietzschean imaginary pals, it served as the jumping-off point for a remarkable run of hugely successful novels in which the Washington-born novelist picked at the loose seams of modern life and illuminated the world in strange new ways.

This ability to take the conventions of society to their often-illogical extremes has seen his novels climax with rabies plagues, time-travelling self-progenitors and the wholesale eradication of financial disparity. That the escalating mayhem is always delivered in sober, everyday prose and rarely transgresses the author’s grimly observed moral framework makes his books all the more powerful. They are also often very funny.

Palahniuk’s latest novel, Snuff, recounts an aging porn queen’s filmed attempt to set the world gang-bang record. It is told from the perspective of three of the 600 men mooching around backstage waiting for their money-shot at glory. I ask gingerly if Palahniuk did any special research for his new book. “Not pornography per se. I talked to a lot of people who actually came to my book events and who have been performers in adult movies. There is the sort of sameness about pornography that I think is in a way a kind of adult bedtime story. You know how it’s going to end and it always ends the same. It’s kind of a comfort thing.”

Pornography, I suggest, is the great leveller. “In the case of Snuff, I always thought of it as more like mortality: everyone being numbered but not knowing when their number would be called by Death – the woman at the top of the stairs in all the bright lights. A bit like in the movie All That Jazz – Barbara Hershey was Death, the beautiful woman dressed in white on
the bed.”

As with the writers’ retreat in Haunted or the four-door families that roam the roads of Lullaby and Rant, Snuff immerses Palahniuk’s damaged, spent protagonists back into some form of community, where they rub fake-tanned shoulders and double-dip tortilla chips with like-minded others. It’s a common theme in his fiction. “It’s very much like what Victor Turner, the anthropologist, would call ‘the liminal event’ – where everyone comes together without a standard hierarchy, where you are together in a very equalised way in a general feeling of community.”

These communities don’t always serve his characters particularly well, however. The retreat in Haunted goes spectacularly wrong and those fight clubs were soon revealed to be a means to a far darker end. “It depends on how you see the point of community. In the case of Fight Club, the point was to empower and somehow strengthen the individual as the community itself decays and falls apart. Once it serves its purpose for sort of proving to its participants how smart and brave they actually are once they have completed their challenges, the community itself is meant to self-destruct.”

Given the book’s title, it comes as no surprise that mortality looms large in Snuff. In several of his previous novels a fomenting plague is unleashed upon society. For long stretches of Snuff, one suspects that this book might be going the same way. Why does the theme keep occurring? “Oh, I think we are very much in love with the idea. It is a very romantic idea that there will be this apocalypse. And every year we are sold a different apocalypse. When I was growing up it was always swine flu – we are all going to die of swine flu! And then it was Y2K and then it was SARS and now bird flu. And so every fall we’re presented with an almost arbitrary plague or a huge disaster. And then every spring we feel the joy and relief of having survived. So it’s this artificial cycle of having survived this giant thing which makes us less concerned with the smaller, circumstantial disasters in our lives.”

Snuff is written in Palahniuk’s by- now familiar minimal, almost staccato style. What is it that attracts him to this way of writing? “Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don’t any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves. It seems that so much writing is being done in the 19th-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained. But in minimalism you just put one detail next to another detail and you allow the reader to decide what the relationship is.”

Then why not just write for the movies? “Well, on one level I really want to be playing to what is maybe the only strength that books have compared to other mass media at this point: that they have this really private nature of consumption and so can depict really extreme things that movies, and television and music cannot, and I just want play to this strength first. And then, second, I want to explore what, Tom Spanbauer [Palahniuk’s minimalist workshop leader and author] calls ‘dangerous writing’, which emphasises that the only type of writing worth doing is the kind of writing that is confrontational and that is edgy. Anything else is a waste of time.”

Snuff is published by Jonathan Cape