To research his latest novel, Chuck Palahniuk spent the past six years talking to people in the alt-right and other extremist groups, trying to understand their grievances and the solutions they proposed. "If they all got their way," he wondered, "what would it look like? Why not depict how this might happen and ultimately the flaws that would emerge?"The result is Adjustment Day , a dystopian depiction of the United States in which the 50 states have been dissolved—after a series of gun massacres—into a new land of ethno-states: Caucasia, Gaysia, and Blacktopia. The book is what you'd expect from the author best known for writing Fight Club : violent, kinetic, and deeply disturbing.Palahniuk is currently touring the country to promote Adjustment Day as well as the paperback launch of his graphic novel Fight Club Two and his coloring books. Reached by phone in Portland, Oregon, Palahniuk spoke to Goodreads contributor Kerry Shaw. Their conversation has been edited.: You know, my original publisher, Doubleday, rejected the novel because they were more frightened by the concept of the list, that online [crowd-sourced] list of people to be assassinated. They thought that was just too plausible and that people would actually create that thing.: It wasn't on my mind, but after the fact, I recognized that these big witch hunts start on the internet in exactly that way you described.: All I have to do is say, "Hey, I'm the Fight Club guy. Can I talk to you?" That opens all these doors on the left and right. So many groups have latched onto the Fight Club stuff: Antifa, the alt-right. Everybody is using pieces of it for their own political purposes.: Boy, it's enormously flattering. I think that's something any kind of creative person wants. They want to contribute to the culture in a way that the culture adopts. After that, there's a kind of letting go because you realize you can't control these things.It's very much like the narrator in Fight Club . Once he realized that the groups had grown beyond his awareness and beyond his control, he couldn't shut them down, he couldn't do anything to resolve them. You want to control your baby, and you realize your baby is living its own life. Parents must go through this.: I would just call up the ones that were available, accessible, and sit down and meet with them. There was one golden boy of the alt-right, Jack Donovan, and he's since distanced himself from them. We sat down for a few hours and just talked about the state of things. He writes books about men's rights, and I wanted to talk to him about those.But he asked for a posed silly selfie, so I did a choke hold, as I typically do with people. And I didn't realize that he had all this classic tattoo flash art on the wall behind him. And part of that was a very small swastika. He put the picture up on social media, and some media outlets picked it up and said, "Look, Palahniuk's this Nazi, choking a Nazi in front of swastikas," when all I was trying to do is research a book.: A little panicked because my father was killed by a white supremacist. I really didn't want to get linked in the public's mind with white supremacy. But I did want to know where people were coming from in order to write this book.: You know, it'll be 20 years next year.: I don't, only because I see this cultural movement as wallpaper, because these school shootings, these workplace shootings, these in-group shootings happen on such a regular basis. They have become the texture of our society, the new normal. So in a way, in Adjustment Day , I wanted to take it to the ultimate extent, the gun violence that would seemingly end all the gun violence.: Boy, I haven't thought of that in terms of enabling. You know, my degree is in journalism, and first and foremost my creative method is to go out and talk to people, to find out what their grievances are and also what solutions they propose.And so in this case, I talked to black separatists, the Hotep Nation people, the Farrakhan people. I talked to white separatists and race realists, a lot of Radical Faerie people. In a way, my job was just to be a reporter and try to make a unified field theory out of all of these people's fantasies so that it would be as much about wish fulfillment as possible.: I'm not sure if I'm really criticizing anything. So much of my process is to take a social model, take somebody's fantasy about how the world should be, fulfill it, and then run it so that its flaws start to show, and then keep running it so that it starts to fall apart. Otherwise, you don't have a story.I grew up in a little town called Burbank, in eastern Washington. It was 600 people, and they were all white. Theoretically, it should've been the Garden of Eden, but people still fought, and they still beat each other, they still took drugs, they still committed suicide, and they still murdered each other. And it was miserable. So in a way, writing Adjustment Day let me revisit this fantasy that just doesn't work out the way you think it will.: And there's something even more personal than that, especially with a short story like Guts , which is about being crippled by different ways of jerking off, and which makes people faint. When you read that in public, it's like committing suicide. You don't have a shred of dignity left by the end. It is so not about making the writer look good; it's about completely degrading the writer.I'm always trying to escape the trap of producing work that's calculated to make me popular with people. That's how we're all so thrown. Our natural inclination is always to look good and to please others. Writing is one tiny part of my life where I can escape that.: No, it's never my goal to provoke or to offend anyone. It's always my goal to try and take something to a point where it shocks me. So if anything, I'm looking for my own limits and bringing myself to a point where I felt like I've gone too far. Because unless I go too far, I don't feel like I've gone far enough.The best example is that line from Fight Club where Marla's in bed with Tyler for the first time, and she says she wants to get pregnant just so she can have his abortion. And I thought, "That is so offensive. That is so beyond the pale." But that's the thing I will not regret when I'm an old person.: Oh boy. I'm usually looking for that kind of authority that comes from a character saying or doing something that's fantastically true but not politically correct. My favorite example is in Denis Johnson 's short story, "Dirty Wedding," which is from Jesus' Son . Fuckhead is taking his girlfriend, Michelle, in for an abortion. And the nurse approaches him in the waiting room and says, "Michelle is at peace now."And he says, "Is she dead?"And the nurse says, "No, she's not dead." The nurse is very troubled.And then Fuckhead says, "You know I kind of wish she was."And when I read that line, I thought, "Oh, it's so honest, but it's still brutal." It's a glorious line. Amy Hempel has this great line, "What dogs want is for no one to ever leave." I'll read a whole novel looking for just one fantastically true line like that.: There's a Korean American author named Nami Mun who has a book called Miles from Nowhere . She's fantastic. Monica Drake is a friend of mine, and her work always inspires me. She always hits the nail on the head.: You know, I run a workshop now on Monday nights that is pretty much based on Tom's method. And more and more, I recognize that the biggest thing workshop does is: number one, it creates an expectation that you will produce work every week. When people are in workshop, they write, and they write a lot. And number two, it gives them a beta audience to read their work in front of. So they can see exactly where it works and exactly where it falls down. And beyond that, everything else is gravy. But just those two things alone are worth it.: The best kind of stories are the ones that generate stories. When everyone is leaning forward and they have an anecdote that is a different version, usually a better version, of what you've just told.Say I present Guts . It's such a humiliating story, but it creates this opportunity for people who have similar stories to rush forward and tell me theirs. And it's amazing what people will share that they've never told anybody. Guts gives people permission to tell their own story. I think that's what a great story does.: It does, but I know a lot of screenwriters who have to sit through preproduction meetings where they have to take the feedback from every actor and every producer and everybody associated with the project. They just become very good at writing down the good stuff and then just nodding and thanking people for the stuff that's not good.: Write to please themselves or shock themselves or entertain themselves. And if anything, to surprise people in workshop. There's a linguistic anthropologist named Shirley Brice Heath Jonathan Franzen has written about her quite a bit. She says the one aspect of writing that people value most is the element of surprise. If a story can surprise the reader, subvert an expectation, then the reader will really treasure that story.I noticed that my more recent writer's workshop—one that I'd been in for, geez, 20 years at least—fell apart about the time I started writing Adjustment Day . I think it was because I was starting to pander to them. Someone in the group, a dear friend of mine, told me I couldn't use the wordanymore, that I would have to leave the workshop if I was going to use the word in a story. Another friend objected to a different word.And I found myself having to write within the constraints of people's sensibilities. There was no way I can write the kind of challenging in-your-face stuff that I love to write. And so I left workshop, and in doing so, I was able to write Adjustment Day . But I think my last few books have been more perhaps frivolous because I was writing to please people in workshop, and that doesn't work. I try to tell people not to do that.: And ultimately it comes down to not what they think of you but what they think of the story. You wanna separate yourself, so they can still like you, still tolerate you, but they can still be offended by your story or they can be really entertained by your story, regardless of how they feel about you.: Writing. It is my ongoing coping mechanism. It's what I would do even if I hadn't made it my profession. It's mainly to be with people. I host these evening work sessions where people come to my office. It'll be 25 or 30 people, all with their laptops, in such complete silence that you think you're alone. And it's such a comfort to just be in the presence of other people who are all writing.: That's all I got. I got nothing better than that.