Crash and learn

>> Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk on
serial killers, urban demolition derbies
and his new book Rant

by JULIET WATERS

About a dozen of the 600 fans who showed up for Chuck Palahniuk’s reading last week wore a nice wedding dress for the occasion (men and women). The bridal wear is a tribute to party-crashing, an urban demolition derby subculture in Palahniuk’s latest, Rant.

Party-crashing is a favourite activity of Buster “Rant” Casey, debatably the first “naturopathic” serial killer. As a kid, Rant’s idea of fun was to stick his hand in holes where he was likely to get bit by rabid animals. As a rabies carrier, he passes the disease on with his saliva. When he’s not infecting women, he’s organizing a game where participants dress up cars with Just Married signs, then stalk and crash into each other.

In person, the author of the quintessential macho satire, Fight Club, is astonishingly nerdy and gentle. Unfortunately, Palahniuk wasn’t allowed to talk about Fight Club, The Musical, which is currently in development. (A film based on Choke will be out in June.) So we talked instead about the communal joys of party-crashing and our obsession with mass killers.

Mirror: Where did you get the idea for party-crashing?

Chuck Palahniuk: People I knew were doing it. And they were people I already admired for other sort of group, community building things they did. So I went along with them.

M: You mean you went party-crashing?

CP: Twice in Portland and twice in San Francisco.

M: And nobody got hurt?

CP: Nope, nobody got hurt. But it’s really just an excuse for people to come together and talk about their lives. Most of it is just driving around and looking for somebody else who is playing the game, and then either chasing them or fleeing from them. So for that moment of excitement, there’s a lot of dead waiting time. It’s like a road trip that never really goes anywhere, that just goes around and around town, and then everybody goes home afterwards.

M: What inspired you to write a novel about a serial killer?

CP: It just seemed to me one of the worst roles that somebody can adopt in a culture, but I also wanted to maintain a measure of sympathy. A worse role would be a child molester, but it’s very hard to create a dark comedy around that. But a lot of people can identify with the impulse of serial killing, enough to find some humour in it. And as it stands in the book, whether or not Rant is actually a serial killer is kind of debatable.

M: Why do you think there is so much fascination with serial killers?

CP: Serial Killers and Nazis, we can’t get enough of them. They must serve some purpose as a symbol for some aspect of ourselves, or we wouldn’t be so obsessed with them. A lot of people call the History Channel the Hitler Channel because it so predominantly shows documentaries about Nazis. There’s something there that always remains unresolved for us that we have to keep going back to.

M: At the same time, contemporary serial killers have to work harder and faster these days to maintain media attention. It’s not enough anymore to kill a dozen women over a decade. In the future, serial killers who want to keep their numbers up are going to have to be more like Rant, they’re going to have to contract out. Or come up with a simple killing concept, like IKEA, don’t you think?

CP: Yeah, they’ll have to come up with franchises and serial killer spin-offs. And again, it’s kind of debatable as to whether or not Rant’s actually doing it, or if he’s just being blamed for a larger entity. You know we’re always looking for that scapegoat that we can pin everything on. Then we can clearly resolve everything by blaming one person.

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk,
Doubleday, hc, 288pp, $24.95