PORTLAND, Ore. — At the very least, "Snuff" is a difficult book to discuss over dinner. With its assemblage of nasty fluids — bodily and otherwise — and its over-the-hill-porn-star heroine who plans to copulate literally to death by taking on 600 men in quick succession, it's also nearly impossible to describe without squirming.

But for Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel, the book is just another chance to push the envelope. His is a nearly scholarly detachment from his subject matter. He discusses his story of paunchy, naked men and lurking vaginal embolism with a friendly, smirk-free smile behind wire-rim glasses.

(ENLARGE)
'Snuff' finds new ways to connect sex and death.
Associated Press / 2006 photo (ENLARGE)
'Things that last in the culture tend to be those unresolved issues,' says author Chuck Palahniuk.
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MEET THE AUTHOR Chuck Palahniuk will sign and discuss "Snuff" at 7:15 p.m. June 4. Cole Auditorium, Georgia Perimeter College-Clarkston Campus. Presented by Georgia Center for the Book. 404-370-8450, Ext. 2225. See chuckpalahniuk.net for signing details. RELATED LINKS: • Photos: Books for the beach • Blog: ATLarts • More book events

A handsome, well-exercised 46-year-old with an almost Midwestern politeness, Palahniuk was looking back over his writing career at a funky restaurant that was once Ginger's Sexy Sauna, a massage joint that offered more than just a cure for a bad back.

Digging into his steak, he began talking about Annabel Chong, the University of Southern California student who offered herself as the object of a record-breaking mass sex scene in 1995.

"The fact that it was so unresolved was very attractive," Palahniuk said of the cultural dissonance between those who considered Chong a take-charge feminist and others who condemned her as a moral travesty. His novels, he said, come from that sort of muddy debate, "things that the culture really can't talk about openly."

Palahniuk's method is to sniff out such subjects, then pounce. "Things that last in the culture tend to be those unresolved issues," he said. "Like Ira Levin's 'The Stepford Wives' was a wonderful, entertaining way to discuss what Susan Faludi would later call backlash. Levin did that again with women's health and abortion with 'Rosemary's Baby.' He was always so ahead of the curve."

Of course, android housewives and devil babies are highly metaphorical and nuanced compared with Palahniuk's subjects. "Fight Club," his 1996 debut, was about guys who go to office jobs tasting their own blood after getting in touch with their masculinity through basement brawls. "Choke," the 2001 novel that opens as a film in September, concerns a sex addict who raises money by choking on dinner in fancy restaurants. And now there's "Snuff," which finds new ways to connect sex and death.

"It's always about finding these cultural bugaboos," he said, "things that people can't talk about openly, and creating a metaphor that lets people deal with it."

Late arriver

Palahniuk came to writing late: He wrote "Fight Club" in his early 30s. He was working as a diesel mechanic and honing his prose by reading to drunk, hostile audiences in bars.

That first novel sold so poorly that it came close to being pulped. Then the "Fight Club" film, directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, bombed at the box office but developed into an enormous cult movie on DVD — "A Clockwork Orange" for a younger generation.

As Palahniuk went from a voyeur of the underground to a famous cult writer, some things became more difficult. He researched that first novel and another by eavesdropping on support groups for alcoholics and for the terminally ill. He'd still be observing them if fame hadn't made his image too familiar.

"It's storytelling," he said of the meetings. "It's better than TV. It's just one incredible story after another. And it's such an inventory of storytelling devices: The way people hold themselves, what they do with their hands when they speak. And people who go on a regular basis are really performers: They have really honed their craft to get the best possible reaction. ... So it's just a joy!"

The ideas, these days, literally come to Palahniuk. "Now people seek me out to tell me their stories."

What connects

Then, despite all the fame and success, Palahniuk does what he's been doing since before his first published novel: He takes the ideas to his weekly writers group and then listens to find out which stories connect.

By the time his writing reaches his "cult" — the rabid young readers who come to his readings and camp out on his Web site — he's ready.

When Palahniuk was at the University of Oregon in the 1980s, he saw a porn film of which he remembers almost nothing except one accidental scene. "There was a moment when the couple or the three-way or whatever is going at it by a mirrored headboard. And behind this frenzy of sexual activity, you could see this folding table, and people standing around with cigarettes and Cheetos and Big Gulps — and bored out of their minds."

This offstage tableau is the setting of most of "Snuff"; a character complains that the cattle-call is "worse than jury duty." It's hardly a setting that would attract most novelists. To Palahniuk, though, it's a chance to take the traditional elements of character and put them where they've rarely been before.

It's no different, he said, than Mozart's opera "The Abduction From the Seraglio."

"In the movie," he said of "Amadeus," "everyone's shocked that he's gonna set this opera in a bordello, in a harem. It's seen as completely corrupt. But then they recognize that despite the setting, and the salacious nature of it, it's still about love."