Taneytown, Md. -Author Chuck Palahniuk is sitting on a red and gold camelback sofa in the parlor room of the Antrim 1844 Country Inn, picking loose fringe from the sofa and piling it neatly on the tea tray in front of him. Pachelbel's Canon in D Major is on the stereo.
We drink from china decorated with magnolia blossoms, while Chuck considers the merits of various plastic body parts, which he tosses out to the audience during readings of his high-testosterone novels. His most famous book is Fight Club, which was made into a 1999 film with Brad Pitt; his newest novel, Pygmy, will be published this week.
Chuck is scheduled to read an excerpt from Pygmy at the Central Library on Thursday night, and the Oregon-based author prides himself on the high entertainment value of these events. So the question of which simulated limb or organ he'll lob at his fans naturally comes up.
"I've done eyeballs," Chuck says, "but they're kind of small.
"For a while, I bought thousands of these truly hideous fake arms. They were dripping with blood, and the end of the bone poked through. But when I was on tour in 2004, on just about every stop, I'd been scheduled to read the day before Aron Ralston, who'd written a book about having to amputate his right arm after it got pinned by a boulder while he was hiking.
"When I showed up with my fake arms, people thought I was making fun of Aron, so I had to stop.
"Last year, I'd toss out life-size, inflatable sex dolls and have a contest to see who could blow them up the quickest. It was my way of dressing up the auditorium. After the readings, I'd go out on the streets and see people carrying 200 to 300 of these things on mass transit. I felt like a low-rent Christo."
Both the anecdote and the setting in which it is told are vintage Chuck. The man is hilarious. He's also one of the nicest, most thoughtful people you could hope to meet. (He's pulling threads off the sofa to make the clean-up easier for the maid.) You instinctively address Chuck by his first name, and would not hesitate to introduce him to your elderly maiden aunt, especially if dear old Ida has a sense of humor.
More than one interviewer has noted that the 47-year-old author's slight physique and soft-spoken demeanor are at odds with the content of his novels, which contain many violent and sexually explicit scenes representative of transgressive fiction. When he reads aloud from his stories, audience members occasionally pass out.
