Chuck Palahniuk Discusses Making People Cry, Porn, New Book Snuff

“Before I start a book, I tell people I'm collecting stories,” he says. “So you send out this request for a certain type of information and it creates this kind of party game, a way of people being together, and they call you and they reward you. A lot of the time we don't know what to say to each other, so this gives us a kind of shared purpose.”

His only concern about this phenomenon is that his most shocking prose might be now overfamiliar. Hence the reason he replaced it for a while with material that instead made people cry. That also proved troublesome. “It's really difficult to salvage an event when everyone starts crying,” he says, matter-of-factly. “You just can't bring the energy back up, it's impossible”.

“Only if it's done right!” he blurts, with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. Composing himself, he continues: “Porn is the adult version of the fairytale. There's a real comforting sameness to it. It's never going to end badly. In that respect porn is really no different than any other coping mechanism that people have, whether it's being funny, or being pretty, or being smart. At some point they just do too much of it and it no longer serves them, it enslaves them.”