Chuck Palahniuk, the prolific author of twisted iconoclastic novels such as "Fight Club" and "Pygmy," has just published his first coloring book.

"Bait," out Tuesday, features eight short stories accompanied by several un-colored illustrations for readers to fill in at will. The project grew out of Palahniuk's experience working on the "Fight Club 2" comic book, which wrapped up earlier this year. The author says he fell in love with the collaborative spirit he encountered while working on the sequel to his novel.

"I would go to the artists and suggest what I thought they could do with an image, and they would counter with an even more outrageous image," Palahniuk says. "And I would go with an even more outrageous image, and we would have this back-and-forth race to the bottom until we agreed on a scandalous image that neither of us would have proposed in the first place."

With "Bait," he seeks to extend the process to his fans, who, with their coloring choices, can complete the book their own way. Several bookstores across the U.S. are holding coloring contests linked to "Bait," and Palahniuk himself is donating prizes, such as leather-bound editions of "Fight Club 2" and fake severed arms bearing his autograph.

"So many of the readers I interact with are creative people themselves," he says. "They bring artwork [to signings], they bring their tattoos and they bring so many expressions of self that I thought this would be a great way for them to participate in the project."

Edited from an interview:

Why did you want to do this collection with a coloring-book aspect?

Number one, I loved working with so many illustrators on the "Fight Club 2" graphic novel, and so many of the illustrators were people who did just alternative covers. But I wanted to do another project to kind of cement my association with them, so I can work with them on something really quick, so we didn't forget each other. Joelle Jones, Duncan Fegredo, these are people I just did not want to lose touch with. Another part was, it just seemed so wonderfully perverse to do really adult stories in what people think of us a children's idiom.

What are the themes at work in this collection?

They're all stories about misplaced nurturance. Most of the stories are about parents that raise their children in a specific way, whether it's about someone caring for an animal, or they're about, in one instance, an employer somehow wanting to save his man-servant, his valet, during the sinking of the Titanic. They're all about someone trying to save someone else, trying to rescue someone else, but in doing so, kind of destroying this person.

What are you working on right now?

That's the problem. I've got a bunch of other projects started, but I'm not sure what is going to be the actual next thing. It's hard to go back to long-form prose after doing a collaborative job like a coloring book or the graphic novel. It was so much fun to work with people. ... I would love to do another coloring book every year for the rest of my life. Doing another series of comics is also really appealing.

Would you want to develop a series of comics that would be longer than the run you did with "Fight Club 2," something that could go on for years?

Actually, I've got most of "Fight Club 3" written, and that could spin for years. But I've also got a graphic novel based on what would be the third book following the first two I've done about a dead little girl named Madison Spencer ("Damned" and "Doomed"). This would complete that story and it would kind of start a new franchise, but in graphic form.

Do you feel like that you've made a change, now that you're a graphic novel writer and not necessarily a novelist?

I just like to mix it up a little bit. I had not realized just how stiff and pretentious the world of literary fiction was until I stepped out of it into comics, into that kind of lovable world of nerds and comic cons, and people who constantly have to collaborate, so they never really built too much of a big ego. It just seems like people at comic parties are a lot more fun than people at book parties.

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