'I think we've got one.' And he tosses into the crowd a fake severed limb, one of 25 he has shipped to Vegas as rewards for his audience.Ĭhuck has a thing about Guts. 'OK,' says Palahniuk from the stage, microphone in hand.

'I think someone over here fell asleep,' says someone at the edge of the stage. 'It was an epileptic fit,' say friends of the empty seat. Some people point accusingly at a young man. The evening ends with him asking the audience how many of them passed out. Two-thirds of the 500 or so people gathered hold up their hands. The event begins that evening with the chief librarian, Moira, dressed in character in sensible shoes and skirt, asking, on behalf of the author, how many of the audience have never been to a public reading before. He looks nothing like his author photograph. Palahniuk, a shaven-headed figure in short-sleeved, salmon-pink shirt, white trousers and brown tasselled loafers, moves with the slightly rolling gait of the muscle-bound. Of course, this being Vegas, that's not New Orleans, the well-known city in the south of the US, but the lesser known Orleans hotel on the fringes of the Vegas strip. I think that will be the book that erases Fight Club.'īefore his reading, I meet Palahniuk for lunch on the corner of Canal Street and Bourbon Street in Orleans. a whole series of very extreme short stories, all linked together with a unifying narrative. 'I want to have the story that makes people weep uncontrollably. And it's not even the most extreme one but it's the one that makes people pass out,' Palahniuk says.

'Guts is a short story from a book of linked short stories.

It is in some sense more shocking than Fight Club, his 1996 novel (later a film) about a secret fraternity of young men who pummel each other half to death in illicit contests, and who gradually evolve into a terrorist unit. Guts, a cautionary masturbation tale writ large, has all the expected Palahniuk ingredients - anatomical detail, suburban melodrama, violence and humour.

Guts by chuck palahniuk summary