Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Chuck Palahniuk is breaking the first two rules of Fight Club: He's talking about Fight Club.

The author's devotees probably won't mind since what's on his mind these days is more of the characters and world he created in his 1996 book, which was adapted three years later into director David Fincher's cult film starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.

The story of an unnamed insomniac narrator, his violent id come to life in the form of Tyler Durden, and an underground society built on bare-knuckle brawls and anarchic ideas continues in Fight Club 2, a 10-issue Dark Horse Comics maxiseries illustrated by Cameron Stewart, debuting in May 2015.

Palahniuk will be on a Fight Club panel with Fincher on Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con 2014, but it was at last year's New York Comic Con where the author's loose lips cemented the project.

"I messed up and said I was doing the sequel in front of 1,500 geeks with telephones," Palahniuk says. "Suddenly, there was this big scramble to honor my word."

Fight Club 2 takes place alternately in the future and the past. It picks up a decade after the ending of his original book, where the protagonist is married to equally problematic Marla Singer and has a 9-year-old son named Junior, though the narrator is failing his son in the same way his dad failed him.

At the same time, Palahniuk says readers will have an idea of Tyler's true origins. "Tyler is something that maybe has been around for centuries and is not just this aberration that's popped into his mind."

Palahniuk brings back most of the characters in the first book as well as the organization Project Mayhem, which still has its hooks in the narrator as he has to save his boy when the youngster's life is in peril.

For years, Palahniuk considered Fight Club finished in his mind. But he began to revisit it while getting sucked into the Portland, Ore., comic-book community and thinking about the writing.

The original book was "such a tirade against fathers — everything I had thought my father had not done combined with everything my peers were griping about their fathers," says Palahniuk, 52. "Now to find myself at the age that my father was when I was trashing him made me want to revisit it from the father's perspective and see if things were any better and why it repeats like that."

Every age has its own crisis, too, and when Palahniuk wrote Fight Club, it was that of a man moving from being the obedient child to a college graduate with heavy student-loan debt who couldn't really make it as a writer.

Now though, there is a crisis of middle age, "where you've made it to a certain extent," he says. "You're still not really happy but for different reasons. Also the idea that if you suppress that wild, creative part of you — that Tyler part of you — do you lose the best part of you? Sure, your life is more stable and safe, but is it a better life?"

Stewart feels Fight Club 2, especially for those like him who were first exposed to the movie, "is as much a meta-fictional comment on the cultural response to Fight Club as it is a sequel." And instead of embracing realism, his style for the series tends toward the "cartoony" because it was "more appropriate for the density of the story and for some of its more absurdly comical moments."

Palahniuk, whose next novel — the "gonzo erotica" Beautiful You — is out in October, says there is one fight club in the book that the narrator attends to relive the good old days.

It is not a knockout of an idea.

"He tries to go back and reclaim that phase of his life, and is just a pathetic failure," Palahniuk says. "He's not that person anymore. But beyond that, it's what the organization has grown into in his absence and what he's pulled back into."