Palahniuk’s latest anything but ordinary

Contemplating the book tour for his new novel, “Haunted,” Chuck Palahniuk grouses a bit about having to hit the road.

“Man, you know, I really don’t look forward to these tours,” he says by telephone from his Portland area home. “I don’t write in order to tour – it’s the thing I have to do in order to write more.”

It’s not that Palahniuk doesn’t like city-hopping or spending time with his readers (including standing-room-only events at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane in 2001 and again last summer).

It’s just the way the whole thing is set up, the position it puts him in.

“Most of my life is spent listening to people’s stories and having very deep, lasting relationships,” he says. “So being on tour is exactly the way I don’t want to be. I have to work very hard to make that superficial, structured interaction with a huge group of people as much fun as possible.”

Palahniuk, in case you’re not familiar, is the best-selling author of eight culture-eviscerating novels, including “Fight Club,” about a group of young men who escape the monotony of their workaday lives by taking turns beating each other’s brains in; “Invisible Monsters,” about a fashion model who goes from It Girl to elephant woman after getting her face shot off in a drive-by shooting; and “Choke,” in which a man pretends to choke in upscale restaurants, then blackmails his rescuers to support himself.

Dark stuff. Very dark stuff, actually. Reading a Palahniuk novel is like getting zipped inside a boxer’s heavy bag while the author goes to work on you, pounding you until there is nothing left but a big bag of bones and blood and pain.

Thing is, some people are really into that kind of literary kink.

It’s no wonder then that at Palahniuk’s book events, the ones he dreads, his way of making them fun usually entails boxes of fake, bloody body parts, dismembered stuffed animals, simulated vomit and any other disturbing stuff he can send attendees home with.

“I think the worst thing I could do is to be pretentious or boring,” says Palahniuk. “That’s why the events are so over the top, is to make sure that the people who have never been to a book event will come back to somebody else’s.”

The audiences Palahniuk pulled in after the success of “Fight Club” were filled with tattooed punks in combat boots, disaffected 30-something white guys in ill-fitting suits and club kids – the kinds of people who hadn’t read a book since high school and then only because they had to.

Fortunately for the author, none of his more recent books has been made into a star-studded Hollywood movie (yet), so anybody who has wanted a piece of him has had to actually go out, buy and read his books.

” ‘Invisible Monsters’ pulls in a different kind of person than ‘Fight Club,’ and ‘Survivor’ pulls in a different person than ‘Diary,’ ” says Palahniuk.

“It’s sort of shocking to see these groups of really different types of people together at one book event. But that’s wonderful to see for me.”

The new book, “Haunted,” doesn’t so much offer up a little something for everybody as much as it does a little something of everybody: A chopped-off finger here. A dead fetus there. Entrails and intestines a la carte.

The plot: 17 would-be writers answer an advertisement for a writer’s retreat and instead are trapped in an abandoned theater and held captive by an old man named Mr. Whittier.

Rather than try to escape, they spend their time telling each other their life stories (all in the same voice: Palahniuk’s), then trying to make the bad situation worse by first sabotaging their environment (ruining the food, cutting the wires for the furnace) and ultimately themselves (hacking off body parts) – so that when they are rescued they can blame it all on Whittier and sell their horrible, horrible story.

Less novel than a collection of short stories rough-stitched together like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, the 400-page monster is a smorgasbord of gore, albeit a socially conscious one.

“It’s about how people never accept responsibility for their future or their actions beyond the moment,” says Palahniuk. “There seems to be a big element that would really just like to be taken care of.”

The “Haunted” characters reveal their loneliness and isolation through the stories they tell each other and by doing so create a community, a common theme in all Palahniuk’s work. Not that any of his themes are even the slightest bit obscured in his books.

“I have a writer friend who says, ‘Subtlety will bring nothing but heartbreak,’ ” Palahniuk says.

“It’s funny because all the younger people, about my last book ‘Diary’ said, ‘Dude, ya know nothing happened, nobody got shredded by wild dogs, are you just not going to do that anymore?’ … They are really loving ‘Haunted.’

“But all those people who gave ‘Diary’ the best reviews of any book I’ve ever written, all those nice my-age people who finally said, ‘Palahniuk is finally writing like an adult … writing about family and parental love and crap like that,’ those folks are hating ‘Haunted’ and saying the book is way too over the top and too upsetting and to confronting and too gruesome.”

If you don’t think you can hack it, Palahniuk says you can. Just think back to all those stories you loved as a kid; they’re where he gets his material.

“I was raised on Grimm’s fairy tales where my favorite stories were the ones where feet were chopped off or the wolf was eviscerated and the grandmother jumped out or people were constantly being forced into ovens and cooked,” he says.

“All those Grimm’s fairy tales that were filled with nothing but violence and gore, there was a real purpose in that. … You know, if people can’t remember folk stories that are so much a part of our psyche, then they’ve already forgotten so much of our culture already.”