Chuck Palahniuk

The man who brought the world brawling philosopher Tyler Durden and the cult classic novel Fight Club got his own worst ass-kicking on a mid-Nineties camping trip. "I went back to work the next week with my face completely trashed. My eyes were just panda-black."

Back at Freightliner, the truck company where Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-nick) worked, co-workers would look away from him when they asked if he did anything fun over the weekend. "I would say, 'Look at my face. C'mon people.' If you look terrible enough, no one will want to know the truth about you." That was the genesis of Fight Club.

The millions of fans of Fight Club—the literary sensation of 1996 turned big-screen phenomenon in 1999—should thank that anonymous camper who whupped Palahniuk's butt. Scrawling scenes on a clipboard while ostensibly working under trucks, Palahniuk wrote his wickedly funny story about underground fighters. The literati hailed Palahniuk as the next big thing. Director David Fincher, Brad Pitt and Ed Norton brought the story brilliantly to the big screen. A cult following popped up on the web at www.chuckpalahniuk.net. And America's hip crowd had a new rule: Always talk about Fight Club.

During all the pre-publicity hoopla for the movie in 1999, Palahniuk suffered a tragic loss: His father was brutally murdered in Idaho. Fred Palahniuk had answered the personal ad of a woman whose ex-husband had threatened to kill her and any man with her. Despite the apparent danger, Palahniuk's father began dating the woman. Less than two months later, the couple were gunned down, their bodies burned down to piles of bones. The ex-husband was eventually found guilty of the crime.

Fred Palahniuk's death spurred his son to investigate the compulsions that drive people to serially bad relationships and random, meaningless sexual encounters. Choke "is about exploring sexual compulsives," says Palahniuk. "My father had such a history of girlfriend after girlfriend, over and over and over, throughout his whole life. And it was this last girlfriend who he met through a personal ad that got him killed."

The tragic genesis of Choke belies the hyperkinetically comedic dissection of unglued male sexuality Palahniuk delivers in this novel. His protagonist, Victor Mancini—whose self-loathing stems from a Tony Soprano-sized complex about his Alzheimer-addled mother—escapes his demons through meaningless sex with RNs, women in sexaholic recovery, strangers in airplane bathrooms. To support his ailing mom, Victor ingeniously fakes choking in restaurants. Once someone "saves" him, Victor hits up the person for pity payouts at holidays, birthdays or whenever he needs cash.

Unlike his antihero, Palahniuk, 39, won't need to fake choking anytime soon to pay the bills, having recently scored six-figure deals for his next novel, a horror tale called Lullaby, and the film rights for Choke. On the eve of the book's release, the easygoing Nine Inch Nails fan took a swing at Playboy.com's questions, discussing the self-destructive allure of fighting and fucking, his refusal to "free the testicles" of a dead body and how a haunted house helped him come to terms with his father's death.