Chuck Palahniuk Books and Movies discussion.

Is there anyone else out there a fan of Chuck Palahniuk's novels? If you aren't familiar with him he's the guy who wrote the book Fight Club.

If anyone is interested it looks like they are finally getting somewhere on the movie based on his book Choke. Here is a link to some casting news. I absolutely loved this book and can't wait to see the movie. Hopefully it is done as well as Fight Club was.

I am currently reading Diary. I'm about a third of the way through and I'm already hooked. Hooked like the way you drive past a horrible accident on the highway and have to look. Then when you actually see something horrifying you still keep looking even though it makes you feel disgusted and uncomfortable. It's not like he writes scary novels but the way he doesn't hold anything back and describes stuff in way more detail than you would normally want to hear is what makes his writings so addictive. Each time I take a break from reading I can't help think to myself "What kind of mental nut do you have to be to even think of stuff like this to write... thank goodness he does!" I'm not sure if there is another author out there quite like him. If there is I have never read or heard anything like what he writes.

If there are any other fans I'd love to discuss his novels and/or movies.

I've read FIGHT CLUB and that's it. I did really enjoy it and the movie

Palahniuk has always been in a Mexican stand-off with Hunter S. Thompson for the title of my favorite writer.

Choke is probably my favorite. I remember a few years back, rumor was that Darren Aronofsky, one of my favorite directors, was set to direct it. But that pretty much fell apart when Aronofsky went on to direct The Fountain, from what I understand.

It looks like it's going to be directed by the guy who wrote the script for Choke, and he's never directed before. Clark Gregg is his name.

Thanks newbie.



Good luck to him.

Yeah, Darren A. considered making CHOKE, but its like 200 other projects of his over the years that didn't happen, nevermind BATMAN: YEAR ONE.

LLC, how many of his books have read besides Choke?

Like I said, he's something of a tossup with Thompson of my favorite writer... So I've read everything but his latest, Rant, which I haven't had the chance to pick up yet.

I'm not familiar with Hunter S. Thompson.

Phony!!!!

So, last night I'm wandering around Union Square late at night... Or "early in the morning" if you want to be technical, and I find myself in Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of Palahniuk's new book, "Rant". I'm flipping through this gargantuan pile of hardcover copies, trying to find the best copy, and in the back of the pile, what do I find but an abandoned autographed copy that never made it's way out of the book-signing when Chuck E. Poppididdiwok (I'm never quite sure how to pronounce the bastard's name) visited New York last month, when the book was fresh to stores.

Pretty god damn cool.

And I've just noticed that I did not go to reply to this thread and accidentally quote my last post, but I actually just edited it to include the story I had meant to reply with and deleted any information if previously withheld. I am amazing.

I picked up Choke and Haunted from the library the other day. I've started Haunted, and its real fucked up. I like it.

I also picked up Better Than Sex by Hunter S. Thompson. I'm about half-way through. It's the first book of his I've read (I've been meaning to read his stuff for a while now, but getting a library card in Motown is such a hassle), and I definitely like it. Fear & Loathing is probably my favorite movie, so I'm looking forward to reading the book.

LLC, you lucky bastard.

Yeah, deffinately make it a point to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The narrative is so out of control and self-indulgent that it'll make you either love or hate Hunter. Personally, I don't see how you can hate it unless you have a stick up your ass.

The descriptions and references he uses are hysterical.

Choke is probably my favorite Palahniuk piece, alongside Survivor. I really like all of his stuff pre-2001, but he's sort of toned it down since 9/11, and gone in something of a Horror-direction. Which is still very cool, he just can't get away with a book like Survivor anymore, where the whole narrative is written as the main character giving a first person account of the events of the story as he rides in an abandoned plane on auto-pilot, waiting for the fuel to run out so he will plummet to his death.

Although, as far as Riot is concerned, it's about a serial killer, from what I understand, so it looks like it's going to be back on track with his older material, mixed with the weird narrative style of Haunted, in that the narrative is told by several characters, all of whom tell stories that contradict one another.

SURVIVOR rocks, but you know what?

I actually would prefer to script INVISIBLE MONSTERS if I could. It would be my f*cked up road trip movie from hell.

I still need to read both of these, I can't wait!

Bogey, have you ever read any of his books before?



Let me know how you like Better Than Sex because I'm also new to Hunter S. Thompson. I'm reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right now, and like LLC said, you should definitely read it. I am finally almost done with it and I think I might have to go back and read it two or three more times just because it's such an easy read and it is so funny in a twisted disturbing way. Similar to Chuck Palahniuk novels, but in more of a "Let's screw with this guys head for the sake of our own amusement" way.

Does anyone know of any other authors that write like Palahniuk and Thompson? I've been a big fan of Elmore Leonard over the years and he is the closest that I have read. But he is almost like the guy that read what was popular way back when (he's old), and took the next step into race relations and funny violent situations (As seen in movies adapted from his books like Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, etc...). Whether you like the movies or not, he is a very good crime writer where you are rooting for the bad guys to succeed. Palahniuk and Thompson seem to have taken his style and went disturbingly further with it. I would love to find more authors who write like them. There has to be more.

Firstly, check out Thompson's Hells Angels next. It's not as insane as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it's his break through piece, a great piece of writing with some sick humor, and I think you'd appreciate it, coming from the Bay area. Ideally, I would recommend Curse of Lono to you, on the basis that it is very similar to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. However, the book was out of print for many years, and it just recently became available to the public once again, only it has been released in a gigantic hardcover edition that is about two feel tall (no exaggeration) and you could quite easily kill a bear with... Resultingly, it is currently $50 dollars. A lot of money for the casual fan. Although, it's a great read, so if you can find it in a library or a second hand book shop, go for it. Or if you want to be crazy like me, buy the $50 edition, and use it to skin animals with, that's cool too.

The Rum Diary is excellent as well, and set to be adapted into a film starring Col. Depp. It's Thompson's first attempt at a novel, so it has this great, raw energy... And, at this point he is still sort of testing the water to see what he can realistically get away with, as far as shock goes. So, there are random spurts of humor that seem really warped and almost irrelevant, which will make you laugh and ask "what the fuck is this?" I remember one chapter where he is sitting in a house, and he looks out the window and sees a three-legged dog whimpering on the sidewalk below the window. Then the chapter ends really abruptly. It's rather humorous.

As for other authors... Check out Irvine Welsh and Kurt Vonnegut. They're both favorites of mine. Read Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Palahniuk is basically the younger, hipper Welsh. He was widely inspired by him. And Vonnegut is brilliant... He has that "what the fuck" sense of humor that is widely present in Thompson and Palahniuk.

I find it amusing just to imagine the use of a hardcover book to kill a bear

I picked up a copy of Survivor today. I just started reading it and it's interesting how the pages are numbered backwards ending with page one I assume.

Yeah, and after you read it, I'll explain to you the book's "secret ending" that Chuck Palahnuik revealed to that fansite of his.

Wicka-whaaaaaaaa? PM me. I've never heard of such a thing.

Go ahead and post it in a spoiler tag so I can read it when I'm finished with the book.

Okay, RRA. I just finished Survivor. What is the secret ending you are talking about?

This book was awesome. I had a hard time getting through the first third of the book then I couldn't put it down. There was one part that made me laugh out loud which had my girlfriend asking me "What? WHAT?! What's so funny? C'mon tell me!". So I had to to explain it and it wasn't really funny after trying to explian the dysfunctional writings of Palahniuk to her. She just thought I was crazy. The part was:

Glad you liked it. Read Choke next.

I'm about two-thirds of the way done with 'Rant', and what seemed semi-normal in the first half got really fucking weird in the last 50 pages or so. I can't even explain it. Even for Palahniuk's standards, it got really fucking weird. I love it.

From Chuck's own words as told to his fansite THE WRITER'S CULT....



You gotta admit, if someone could work that ending into the possible film-adaptation.........groovy.

Excellent. I hadn't heard that before. I like it.

Yeah, that is awesome RRA, thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Could Survivor really be a book that could be made into a movie, post 9/11? I would personally love to see it made, but I'm probably in the minority (with you guys).

LLC, I've actually already read Choke. I bought Invisible Monsters to read, but first I'm reading one of you're other suggestions, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Great! Palahniuk wouldn't be as he is without Vonnegut.

As for Survivor, I don't see what the deal is. The fact that 9/11 occurred really serves no relevance, because they're two very different insights on plane crashes that really have nothing in common other than the fact that they are crashes. In one, several people died, and the plane was hijacked in the name of political and religious differences. The other depicts a crash in which all potential-victims were evacuated, and the pilots bailed... No one was hurt, nothing--other than the plane--was destroyed.

It's quite stupid. It's just as stupid as mandatory censorship of the image of the towers in many post-9/11 films and television shows. It's just completely illogical. I'd personally LOVE to see Survivor adapted into a film. Besides, after 9/11, I think 1999's Fight Club adaptation leaves us with a much more haunting ending, one which isn't really all that frightening to begin with.

I just don't see why it should be a problem, before or after 9/11.

Yeah, I agree the movie should definitely be made. I'm glad Choke is being made first, but Survivor should be next, at least of the books I've read so far. I would love to see his physical transformation on screen once the agent gets a hold of him.

By the way. I have never read the book Fight Club. Is it just me, or does anyone else have trouble reading a book after they have already seen the movie? I never get more than half way through before I give up because everything that is described doesn't matter because I picture in my head what I saw in the movie. For example, if Brad Pitts character in the movie were described in the book as having a receding hairline with a long gray mullet, I would still see Brad Pitt in my head. It throws me off. I'm sure I'm missing out on one of his best books, but I just don't know if I could get through it without seeing David Finchers idea of the book, rather than Palahniuk's descriptive idea.

Well, I saw Fight Club first and loved it to pieces, so I was actually rather eager to get through. Same thing with Fear and Loathing.

So I guess you're the opposite of me when it comes to reading books first or seeing the movie first. A while back I purposely read The Da Vinci Code a month or so before the movie came out just because I knew I wouldn't be able to enjoy the book once I saw the movie. Ironically I refuse to see the movie after reading the book so this whole point doesn't really prove anything. Although there was still a small inkling of me that wanted to see the movie still, but once I saw Tom Hanks' hair in the trailers I was a hundred percent sure I wasn't going to watch it.

What I'm trying to say is when I read the book it helps me decide if the movie is worth seeing. If I see the movie first, it's impossible for me to read the book no matter how good the movie was.

I wish it were the other way around.

I was half asleep when I made that post; I feel inclined to elaborate. I'd usually prefer to read the book first, but if I absolutely love the film, I manage my way through the book in record time.

It's a complicated issue for me, this. It'd take a while for me to get my opinions into some sort of argument, but I think that it's important, in order to get the best out of both texts, to concentrate just as much on form than on subject matter. A lot of book-to-film adaptations allow the original text to serve the entire purpose for the second version, so what follows is a story-heavy film. Of course, because films aren't marketable once they're past a certain length, and because adaptations are more often than not financial cash-ins, a lot of adaptations are deemed inadequate because they're not detailed enough, because of time, because of the irrationality of an image compared to a sentence for telling a story. I think a lot of the people in the film industry are under the illusion that an adaptation is like an upgrade - "the Cinema is superior to the Novel", which is of course absurd. On the flip side, of course, you get people who hold a rather snobbish view that film adaptations are somehow ethically or artistically dubious, or wrong. Not so (though a lot result in awful films).

I actually think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a very good adaptation, without having read the novel. Why? Because it makes use of the cinematic uniqueness of the medium. Just like the novel is (from what excerpts I've read) a writer's novel, the adaptation is a filmmaker's film. I don't necessarily like it as a film, but that's not taking away from the fact that it's made the most of the medium's technologies available, and made it its own.

Does The Da Vinci Code do that? Not really. Fear and Loathing is directed by Terry Gilliam, who is more than capable of taking an original text into different and unique realms. The Da Vinci Code is a bit silly, really, in the hands of Ron Howard, a by-the-numbers, conventional filmmaker who, it seems, took the popularity of the book and transformed its structure to form the basis of the film.

Film adaptations which I think are worthy of being made (to name a few): The Godfather, The French Connection, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman. And praising the adaptations is not to say I dislike the originals, or even to say they "needed" adapting.

Forgive my incohesion. Like I said, it's a complicated issue for me.

And to elaborate somewhat further:

I see what you mean, but that's not to take away from the pleasure gained from appreciating how it's written. Literature, to me, is the "foregrounding of language" (as written in Jonathan Cutter's A Short Introduction to Literature). And so our primary engagement with a work of Literature should be in the use of language to evoke, construct or enhance meaning. Cinema exists, before anything else, via the image to inform meaning; and, since 1927, sound as well.

Supposedly the movie Choke was played at the Sundance film festival, but according to IMDB is scheduled to be released in theaters August 28th. Is that normal for Sundance movies to be released so much later?

I can't wait any longer for this movie.

One on my favorite writers. Have read them all and just finished Haunted. Good book but I read Survior first out of them all and like that one the best.

And for Choke, I've seen the trailer for it and it looks awesomoe. I cant wait for it either.

I haven't read Haunted. I think Survivor is my second favorite so far after Choke.

I didn't realize there was a trailer for Choke! I'm going to try and find it right now.

I had no idea Choke was being made into a movie! Awesome.

And I think The Great Shark Hunt has some pretty good stuff in it by HST.

Opps, I lied. Not really a trailer but it shows some clips.

http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/interview_and_footage_from_choke

Has anyone seen the movie Choke yet? It very quietly came out a couple of weeks ago and I haven't had a chance to watch it. I will probably have to wait for the DVD. I can't imagine it is anywhere near the quality of Fight Club but I still want to see it.

Longneck's partial review of the book Rant reminded me of this thread.

I watched the movie Choke about a week ago, which recently came out on DVD, and I have to say it is one of the worst book-to-movie adaptations I've ever seen. Aside from the horrible editing and overall filmmaking, the adaptation focused on the sex addiction part of the book and missed out completely on some of the true comical gems, including the ending. What a complete failure. I don't know what Chuck Palahniuk thinks about the movie, but if I were him I would be embarrassed to be associated with this piece of crap movie.

Choke is still one of my favorite novels I've ever read, but stay away from the movie.

Rant might be Chuck Palahniuk's most fucked up book.

It starts out seemingly normal but the more you read the weirder it gets.

I just finished it today.

I want to read Haunted and Snuff next.

I haven't read either of those, so let me know if you like them!

Snuff looked pretty interesting at the book store, but it might be awhile before I get around to it.

Which of his novels have you read so far?

Fight Club, Choke, some of Invisible Monsters, Rant.

Yeah, RANT was fucked-up, but in a good way, that is jarring you from the usual shit, especially the usual "shocking fucked-up" works that usually aren't...well, all that fucked up.

I dare someone to adapt that and INVISIBLE MONSTERS. That latter would be a terrific road trip from hell movie.