Chuck Palahniuk: Too extreme to be read out loud?

Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's eighth novel Rant (Jonathan Cape, May), described as an "oral biography", relates the eventful life of Buster Casey through a series of anecdotes from more than 50 "friends, enemies, detractors and relations".

Casey's is a short life of escalating destruction. His pastimes include getting bitten by black widow spiders, sniffing used sanitary towels, crashing cars as part of a posse of joyriders known as "Party Crashers", and spreading the rabies virus.

The book's form is a twist on non-fiction biographies such as Capote by George Plimpton and Edie by Jean Stein, books that eschew the traditional single-person voice-over replacing it instead with multiple‚often contradictory‚narrators.

Palahniuk says that the form excited him as a writer of fiction. "The 'oral biography' is incredibly dynamic, but it is usually used to depict the story of people who aren't themselves so interesting." he says. "Rather than use the form to compensate for a character who was not intrinsically that interesting, I wanted to tell the story of a very dynamic character."

The form also enabled the writer to push the boundaries of what the reader would believe: "The non-fiction form allows me to tell an even more over-the-top story. There is a long history of telling incredible stories, and making them believable by using non-fiction forms 'The Blair Witch Project', 'Citizen Kane' and 'Fargo'."

Palahniuk, who despite his success still attends a weekly writers' group, has experimented with ideas about storytelling in the past‚the backwards page count of Survivor for example, or the schizophrenic narrator of Fight Club, who is effectively telling the story of himself re-imagined as a separate character. "The audience right now is the most sophisticated in the history of the world," he says. "They have seen all the plots, and they've seen all the forms, and they know that the person who tells the story is as important as the story. They no longer accept the third person omniscient narrator. They know someone is telling the story and they want to know why they are telling it, how they flavour the story itself, and why we should believe that version of the story they are telling."

Often labelled a "shock writer", Palahniuk's fiction explores characters in extremis existing on the margins of society. He has been called a nihilist, although he says his stories are really romances: "The story is always a romance, always someone being delivered from isolation back into community and ultimately back into a committed relationship. But people just wear different costumes, and some people react to the costumes and the set, while others react to the core story."

The writer is unapologetic about what could be described as shock-jock tactics in the telling of those stories‚he has previously criticised books for becoming a form of "comfort food". He says: "It is things that generate discussion or disagreement that have the most power." There is more energy, he says, in something that the culture cannot readily accept, that has to be mulled over to really be digested.

He says that the most common response to his work is laughter, but that at readings of his short story "Guts" people have fainted. "My entire process is about getting to the point where I shock and surprise myself. Where I get to the point that I say 'I could never read that in public‚that's just too far'. Because unless I get to that place, then I will beat myself up later thinking 'why didn't I just do that?' The entire thing is about putting something on the page that I do regret."