These are Chuck Palahniuk's responses to your questions:
 
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1. Do you think the short story is a dying art form and was Haunted an attempt to resurrect it?

Short stories seem to come into fashion every ten years. When I started to study writing, the culture was filled with story collections like The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard and The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. But maybe because collections - even great collections - never sell as well as novels, stories seem to pass out of fashion for another decade. As much as I love short stories, my goal was never to rescue or revive the form. One of my favorite stories has always been Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, which spurred a flurry of subscription cancellations when The New Yorker magazine first published it in the late 1940's. That one story generated more reader mail than all other fiction, combined, that the magazine ever presented. If I had a goal with Haunted that was to write stories which would prompt the degree of reaction that Jackson's incredible story did. In our un-shockable age, what would a story have to depict in order to resurrect the dying ART OF READING?

Peter Martin, Canterbury

2. When writing Haunted did you start with the short stories or the framework?

Both. I had a stack of stories, some long, some short. And I had a stage play involving characters who'd enter the theater from the lobby, ignoring the audience, and establish themselves as an artists' retreat. Over the course of the play, they'd trap themselves and create the dire circumstances that would give the survivors the most-marketable life story. The actors would always manipulate the truth to cast themselves in the best, most sympathetic light. Reality would break down, and… the end. My editor kept asking if I could "wrap" the existing stories into a longer narrative, so I just shuffled the play and the stories together. The last parts I wrote were the poems that introduce each speaker and story; I needed a pause, a way to settle the reader's attention on each speaker before their story began.

3. Would you like to collaborate with another author? If so, who?

Good question… How about Irvine Welsh? We've done some great reading events together. I think we could write a book or screenplay with no threat of offending each other. My ideas tend to go too far for most other writers.

4. I've not read your work before, but this book has drawn me …. Not by the 'bit on the back' or the preface, but by the cover. What is it that urged you to present your book this way and how well do you think it portrays the essence of the book?

Please! Do not give me any credit for the brilliant images that seem to occur like magic on my book covers. In the states, one man named Rodrigo Corral has invented a bold symbol for each of my books with Random House. Rodrigo's images are so engaging that countless young readers have stripped off their clothes at public events and shown me images from all my books now tattoo'd on chests and arms and legs. To date, I'm delighted with the covers - especially the new glow-in-the-dark covers. But I don't have the skill to take credit for that great work.

6. Do you ever write from your own experiences?

In my book of essays, Nonfiction, and my travel book, Fugitives and Refugees, I tell many of the true-life experiences that have become scenes in my fiction. Most of my fiction, at least 90 percent, comes from my own life or the true stories that my peers tell me. Lately, more and more of my stories are coming from people who approach me and know they can confess things to me without fear of being judged or dismissed. The spectrum of human experience is so vast that I love hearing true stories that could never be depicted on television or in movies.

7. What is your favourite of all the novels that you have written?

After you've written, edited, proof-read and promoted a novel, it's tough to still love it. With that in mind, my next book, the one that's still a secret passion, that's my favorite. Once the current book gets a cover, I'm always working on a new book, excited about shocking and dazzling myself and my friends with the next story. If I had to choose a favorite among my past novels, I'd say "Lullaby" because I was so happy with the magical "flash-forward" scenes that make no sense until you've read the entire book. Plus, writing that book, I got to assemble dozens of miniature buildings for a friend's elaborate model train set. As a child, that's something I did with my father, and it still felt good.

8. What did you think of the film of Fight Club? Did you have much involvement in the film-making process?

The film was and is terrific. At first, too terrific. I was afraid that people would forget there ever was a novel, or worse, they'd think the novel was written by a hired hack, after the film's success. To date the book and film are different enough that they've both stayed in the culture, generating more fight clubs, more songs, more quotes. During the filming, I hung out and watched. I talked to everyone, trying to get some sense of their job tasks - the actors and sound technicians and set designers, everyone. People are seldom as entertaining as when they discuss their career skills. My best skill is watching and listening, being a fly-on-the-wall.

9. Who are the authors that most inspire you?

So many writers inspire me… but most of them are known for short stories, maybe because stories are a form that I can dissect in my mind and mimic in order to learn those writers' techniques. To write better, I'll ape Amy Hempel. All of her work has just been re-published as a single Complete Works volume. Or I'll study Junot Diaz's book, Drown. Or Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. Honored Guest by Joy Williams.

9. Can you tell us anything about what you are working on at the moment?

I'm one draft away from finishing a new novel called Rant. It's a fake biography, told in the non-fiction form of an oral history. In this form, hundreds of people are interviewed about the subject, and those interviews are cut and pasted together into a kind-of collage, creating bite-sized observations that accumulate to create a very readable, dense, rich story. Rant describes the life of a demented red-neck Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer type. To some people, he's the worst serial killer in history. To other people, he's a hero. And of course it's a big romance -- or at least the twisted, perverted, sickening scenarios that pass as love in my world. With a lot of auto accidents and rattlesnakes.

CLICK HERE for an extract from the book.

Other Interviews

Chloe Hooper for A Child's Book of True Crime

Bo Caldwell for The Distant Land of My Father

Carol Goodman for The Lake of Dead Languages

Mary Lawson for Crow Lake

Mark Haddon for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Karin Slaughter for Kisscut and Blindsighted

Sebastian Faulks for Birdsong

Elizabeth Bergs for True to Form

Anne Tylers for The Amateur Marriage

Rose Tremain for The Colour

Alice Hoffman for Blackbird House

Jane Juska for A Round-Heeled Woman

Ian McEwan for Enduring Love

Audrey Niffenegger for The Time Traveler's Wife

Deborah Moggach for These Foolish Things

Lindsey Davis for Scandal Takes a Holiday

Deborah Lawrenson for The Art of Falling

A. L. Kennedy for Paradise

Arthur Golden for Memoirs of a Geisha

Margaret Forster for Is There Anything You Want?

Diana Evans for 26a

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