always get a little nervous before doing an interview. I'm generally a shy person and terrible at asking pointed questions, always afraid the subject will get offended and hang up. With Chuck Palahniuk, I had the opposite reaction. How could I possibly be saucy enough for the bad-boy author of Fight Club, someone who dares to cull the darkest depths of fringe culture and skewer all our precious mainstream assumptions? His latest book, Lullaby, centers around a solitary widower named Streator who sets out on a cross-country odyssey to find and destroy all copies of a murderous ancient African chant. On the surface, the trip seems pretty altruistic, but true to the Palahniuk aesthetic, it turns into a twisted parable about power and nihilism. Sitting down with Palahniuk to discuss such topics as necrophilia and the supernatural, I found him to be quite charming and the same in conversation as he is on the page: a fascinating storyteller.

So your new book is Lullaby. I was wondering if your parents read or sang to you as a child.
Yeah, they always read to us. It was a ritual every night to get us calmed down. There were four kids, and either Mom or Dad would sit on the floor with a book in front of them and we would all lie like spokes of a wheel around the book. And I remember just wanting to read so badly, because I felt my mom read so slow. I just wanted to be able to read so I could turn that page as quick as I wanted.

A peaceful enough memory: So why does the lullaby in the book kill people? Is it a metaphor about how words can impact people's lives?
On one level, it's about the power of words and trying to reclaim that power. The way that people shape their lives by what they say. On another level, it's making fun of how fast we go to death as a resolution. As a culture, we believe that if we kill something, we've killed the issue. That's why so many books end with death, why so many plays end with death, because it's full resolution. I'm always curious to know what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. In a way, that's the beginning of the story. Maybe beyond the story is even better.

Your characters — Mona and Streator and Oyster and Helen — are described as a new kind of nuclear family. There's a lot of sexual tension in this family. Are you speaking from personal experience?
[laughs] No. On one level, it's a plot device, it's just to make as many connections to as many characters as possible. And on another level, it shows allegiances, how people sort of match up and create different alliances within families. I listen to Dr. Laura on the radio and she talks a lot about blended families where there's a lot more likelihood of sexual things happening.

What's the fascination with Dr. Laura? How often do you listen to her?
I listen to her on a headset, while I'm working outside, maybe a couple of times a week if I can manage it. But I'm more interested in looking for patterns, and the main pattern I've noticed, is that in the past couple of weeks she's really changed the way she conducts the show. She's asking people to call back on an ongoing basis, establishing these recurring relationships with folks. She's not just sort of pissing on them and cutting the line. She is becoming, really, the kinder and gentler Dr. Laura.

In the book, both the main characters have lost their spouses. I was wondering, are you currently married, have you ever been married?
I'm married, I was married before I started writing and we decided that I wouldn't discuss that part of my life.

In the end of the book, Helen Hoover Boyle — the main character's love interest and an ultrafeminine character — turns into a man. Is this a comment on gender and sexuality not being wrapped up with true identity?
To a certain extent, in all my books, I try not to rely on gender very much. I want characters' genders to be almost beside the point. It doesn't really affect how they live their lives. It would have been fascinating to write Fight Club with all the genders reversed: a woman who discovers fighting by meeting another woman, and she runs into this guy in a support group who she can't get out of her mind. You could really run that story with whatever gender combination you wanted and it would be just as interesting. Maybe more interesting. When Helen turns into a man, and ends up on the road with Streator, the two of them in love but just not making it sexually, it's really a comment about how relationships get after twenty, thirty, forty years. People still really care for and love each other, but they're no longer sexual. Like my grandparents. They were married sixty years, but I don't think they even slept together for the last twenty. It's just sort of the demonstration that relationships can be deep and caring and lifelong, but after a certain point, they just don't have to be sexual.

Did you research Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for Lullaby?
Yeah, I do a huge amount of research. For SIDS I think I read three different books, as well as all these forensic and pathology manuals that had chapters on SIDS.

What's the fascination? Do you have children?
No. But in a way, I try to write like the Greeks. When they couldn't explain one aspect of their culture, like the weather, they would invent a story for why the weather was the way it was. I think it's sort of powerful to take something in the world that's inexplicable, and to invent a story to explain things. There are fewer and fewer things in the world that are still these powerful, frightening mysteries. And one of those seems to be SIDS. So I just took this very mysterious, very frightening thing, and invented a story, a mythology, to explain it.

What about the necrophilia in the book?
[laughs] Yeah, I did research that a little bit, but there's not a whole lot of stuff on necrophilia. I did come across some new political activism — necrophiliacs banding together and carrying these necrophiliac cards saying, "in the event of my death, please make my body available to my fellow necrophiliacs for sexual experimentation."

That's so bizarre. Is it legal?
I'm not sure. In some states it's still considered abuse of a corpse.

I wonder about card carrying . . . if you professed to be a necrophiliac, if that would be grounds for . . . but I guess people profess to be all sorts of things.
The most high-profile necrophiliac cases I came across were all women, including the really famous case in California a couple of years ago about a young woman who ran off with the body of a young, attractive man, which she was supposed to be taking to a funeral, and instead she took it up to the mountains in the hearse and slept with it for five days, I think. She eventually took an overdose of aspirin because she wanted to die with it. And she was eventually prosecuted. For female necrophiliacs it seems to be a safe way to have an intimate experience with a man. So in a way, it seemed to be just incredibly touching.

The theme of sex addiction seems to come up a lot in your writing. What's interesting about it to you?
Everybody has to have a coping mechanism. I dealt with sex addiction in Choke, and in Lullaby, there's that character, the paramedic, who is, in his own way, a sex addict. But he's a two-dimensional character because we just need a character to hate, to have a showdown with, to add that sort of extra dynamic to the story and demonstrate another way that people look for their power with the culling song. In this case, the paramedic feels powerless in sexual relationships with women, and he's going to gain that power.

Do you see it just like any another addiction, a form of self-medication?
For every book I have about SIDS, I have ten books about sexual addiction. There are so many theories. One of the most popular is that sex addicts really use sex as an anesthetic. They use it to distract themselves and change their body chemistry, in the same way someone uses heroin or drinks. Sort of doping themselves and sedating themselves, exhausting themselves. So that seems to be the primary reason why Victory uses sex in Choke, to distract himself.

Is Lullaby, with death and murder as its main theme, your ultimate ode to minimalism?
Lullaby is probably the furthest from minimalism I've done. There was a push from the publishing house to make the book accessible to as many people as possible, they felt that for a genre like horror, the book had to be accessible to a much wider audience so in a way that watered down the stylistic tics of minimalism.

Your publisher actually influenced the book's direction?
Well, I decided I was going to do a horror book, and my editor really pushed me to making the book as clear and accessible as possible.

You've said that you don't believe in the innocent character, a victim of circumstance. What could be more out of a character's control than stumbling across a murderous culling song?
These people have all placed themselves in the situations they're in. So I don't think anyone is a completely innocent character, controlled by circumstance. Even if it was just Streator's attempt to manipulate his child and put it to sleep with a lullaby, it was still an intent to control another human being.

Do you believe in the supernatural?
Yeah, I do. I have to.

What makes you say that?
Last year, I got a job house-sitting for some friends at a farm. They'd always insisted their farm was haunted. It's outside of the city quite a way, and I got a bunch of other friends together for a séance, along with two psychics who I'd never met before. The psychics were named Bonnie and Molly. As soon as we sat down at the dining room table, they turned to my friend Nina and said, "There's a woman with you named Margaret. She's with you a lot. She's showering you with petals of flowers, and the flowers are forget-me-nots. Does this mean anything to you?" Nina just started crying. She's not a really emotive person, but she was just weeping and shocked because they were referring to her mother who died. Forget-me-nots were her mother's favorite flowers.

Then they turned to me and said, "There's a man with you right now, and he's really, really sorry he did something when you were six, but it was the only way he knew to teach you this lesson. At the time, he was a fairly young man himself, and he's sorry he made these mistakes, they still haunt him." And she started saying that when I was six, he made me kneel by a chopping block and he was holding something wooden and he was trying to dismember me, and they said, "Does this mean anything to you?" I just sat there with a smile on my face saying "Nope, nope, doesn't mean a thing," but they described the scene more and more thoroughly.

I had never told anyone this, but when I was six, I got a big machine washer out of my father's toolbox. I put it around one of my fingers and left it there all day because it got stuck, until my finger was just black and numb. Finally, I went to my dad and asked him if he could help me get this washer off, and he said at that point, we were going to have to cut my finger off. So he spent the afternoon lecturing me about personal responsibility. How if you do something, you have to suffer the consequences, and you can't blame other people. We sharpened the ax, washed it, and he had me kneel down at the chopping block where we chopped wood. At the last moment, he missed my hand with the ax and used soap and water to get the washer off my finger. At the time, I remember there was no drama involved. This was just something that had to be done. My dad was doing me a favor, helping me resolve this situation that I had created. It became very clear that I was going to be responsible for myself for the rest of my life. I also knew it was a story that didn't make my dad look great and that people wouldn't understand, so I never told anybody. I didn't even tell my mother because I knew it would make her go crazy.

I went to the website that your publisher created for this book, and there was this poignant story about the death of your father in 1999. What you say inspired the book. You're such a private person — why, at this point, share it with your fans and the public at large?
Well, my father is dead, and I can't make him a public person now. I still won't share stories about my siblings or my family for fear of making them public people and disrupting their lives. But on another level, part of writing Lullaby is a metaphoric story about dealing with that issue, and really resolving it. I'm trying to explore my father's death from every angle and exhaust all the emotion and drama I have. I compare it to the flooding technique in psychology. If someone is really sensitized to, say, snakes or spiders, you put them in a room full of snakes and spiders, trapped with the thing they fear most, until they become kind of comfortable or jaded. In a way, their upset short-circuits, sort of burns itself out.

So by addressing your father's death, and the manner of his death — he was murdered — you're facing that fear of mortality and a gruesome death?
I'm facing death, but I think I'm more facing what we do beyond that. Should the man who killed my father die? Does that resolve anything for me, will seeing him die make my life any better?

You had to write a victim's rights letter about whether you believed your father's killer should get the death penalty. Did you ultimately take a stand?
I recommended the death penalty, but only if I was present as a witness, to see what I had recommended. I think there's too much in the world of people wanting things killed but not wanting to be there for it. It's going to be a terrible thing. I think I should suffer the consequences for having brought it about, at least by being present for it.

And are they going to allow that?
I don't know. His sentences will be under appeal for years. You know, maybe there'll be another book in my future about that.

In reading that story, I also discovered that you had been a crime reporter, and that when you had to look at the photograph of your father's body, to identify him, you thought you would be okay with it because you had already seen many more horrifying things. What were the worst?
Car accidents. One man had run down a robber, just run him over. By the time we got there, the body was covered with wasps — it was summer. A lot of drownings. Because Oregon has a lot of lakes and rivers where people just love to get drunk.

I remember when I decided to move to New York City, a couple of months before I actually made the move, I visited a friend. I was sitting in this apartment looking out over the East River, and I saw, on the police docks below, the police haul a body out of the water. It was in the middle of January and they just left him on the dock, not covered, the naked, dead body for a couple of hours while they went and ate lunch. And I remember thinking, this is a tough city.
[laughs] It's amazing. Drowning victims always look so fat.

I was on the thirtieth floor, so I didn't see a lot of detail, but it was just this big, white, bloated body. He looked huge.
I'm always amazed when they're wearing jeans . . . the jeans will be just incredibly skin-tight because the body is so bloated. And at first I used to think, god, if I were going to commit suicide, I would not wear such tight jeans. Then I realized it's part of the decomposition process.

Why did you stop being a crime reporter?
It paid five dollars an hour. Even in 1986, that was nothing.

I'm surprised they could get anybody to be one.
I was part of that whole bubble of people who grew up during Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein made investigative journalism a glamorous profession. So I was part of that huge groundswell of journalism majors that really flooded the market and drove down the prices, the pay. Two hundred people wanted every five-dollar-an-hour job.

Do you now write your novels with an idea that they might be turned in to films?
No. In a way I still operate out of the idea that movies are the enemy. Books have got a lot of catching up to do before they get anywhere near music and movies.

What are you working on right now?
I'm doing a really dark travel book about Portland. Portland is sort of famous for having really crazy, crazy people. It's the cheapest place to live on the West Coast, so it ends up with the misfits of the misfits. Just the most cracked people.

So what other projects are you working on? I noticed on your website a movie trailer, and a contest for fans to get their name in your next book.
I just finished the second draft of a horror novel for next year called Period Revival. Dennis and Amy, who run my fan site chuckpalahniuk.net, they want to do an independent film, and they need seed money. So, they're running a contest, and they asked if I would provide prizes. The top six people will be written in as characters in my next book. It's me making fun of writers getting kickbacks from companies for using the company name in books. The woman who used Bulgari throughout her whole mystery novel, and got like fifty thousand dollars.

You've said that you do most of your writing in public places, that distraction forces your brain to go in directions that it wouldn't normally. I find that interesting and hard to believe: Don't you need a quiet place to concentrate?
Not necessarily. I like being in public places: it's like being in a field that you can harvest. If you need a bit of physical description, you can look up and there's going to be somebody with the color of hair that you need, or somebody talking whose gestures you can study and feel. All those little bits of real-world business, you know, you can't remember those when you're sitting alone at your computer. Also, more often then not, people read in public places where they have a lot of distraction, and that forces me to realize that I'm competing against all those other things in the world, so my stuff better be worth it.

To read an excerpt from Lullaby, click here.