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Feature [published November 2002]
Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have Your Abortion”
Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk
When Brett Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American
Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid,
Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. Ellis’
literary missile was unlike anything written before.
Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking attention
to detail as a Guide Book On How To Become
A Serial Killer could only have come from the author
pawing over endless (and actual) FBI case files – even
if his obsession with detailing designer outfits drove me
to insanity. But this man captured the 80s generation
with its greed, Darwinian Manifesto and scent of Wall
Street’s cold-hearted brutality.
Irvine Welsh carved a new language into our consciousness
with his ode to heroin, bleak council estates
and a dash of nihilism in 1993 with Trainspotting.
Clawing through those initial pages with their illegible
scrawl and phonetically terrestrial sounds required the
tenacity of a saint.
Then there was sci-fi maverick, Jeff Noon, much less
the enfant terrible than his Scottish cousin. Sci-fi had
suddenly become cool again and it was less attributable
to the Asimov school-of-thought than a quote concocted
BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and
within The Mail On Sunday laboratory: “Jeff Noon is
the Philip K. Dick for the 90s”, it roared.
Noon’s third novel, Automated Alice, was as much
a tribute to Lewis Carroll’s original, opiated Alice In
Wonderland dream, as it was a journey into Cyberpunk
psychedelia gone haywire in contemporary Manchester.
Nymphomation (released a year later) polluted the
reader’s waking hours with the notion of burbflies,
automated advertisements chanting their slogans and a
slow, synthetic, evolutionary genocide.
The aforementioned authors have all created a new
language, so to speak. Sprouted buzzwords like the
historians of old and chronicled the social decay of
humanity along the way. Ellis paired savage with
savvy; Welsh, lower-class narcissism with narcotic
decay; and Noon, corporatisation with soulless human
existence. They all hacked into the literary, global cog,
shunned the sweet smelling pungency of sentimental
verse and offered up their own versions of the darker
edge of the sword.
And then there’s Chuck Palahniuk.
Critic Roger Ebert crowned him the godfather of
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