Chuck's next novel, Damned, will be released by Random House on September 6, 2011!  The release date just popped up on Amazon last week.  There is no pre-order or cover art yet, but you can keep an eye on things at this link.  For those of you who don't know anything yet about this upcoming novel, here's a quick summary from Chuck that he gave during a recent interview with Suicide Girls:

So Damned is about an eleven-year old girl who wakes up basically and finds that she is in hell and that she's dead, and that she's going to be eleven-years old and dead in hell for the rest of eternity. So she has to, number one, make friends and figure out how hell works and make the best of it. But she's also got to figure out why she's in hell and how she died, and then ultimately whether or not she wants to petition to go to heaven, to try and uncover some mistake that might have been made. So it's about an eleven-year old, a very optimistic, cheerful, pushy little girl who finds herself in hell. read more »

This one is new for me.  Yet another trailer mash-up of movies.  This one between Toy Story and Fight Club.  Pretty good.

Props to Kasey Carpenter for letting us know about it.

All-New Class Launch at ChuckPalahniuk.net

A recent survey of previous cult master class students revealed key areas of craft our students would like to tackle in an upcoming intensive class. In particular, conflict and dramatic arc drew a lot of votes. Next to that, survey respondents chose poetic elements in prose--the music of everyday language--as a preferred area of focus. A fair number also requested a class that would focus on finishing or resurrecting a previously unfinished story and shaping it into a final product, ready for print.

Art of the Short Story is a newly developed intensive six-week class that takes on all of these challenges and more. Students will be asked to register early and to submit an unfinished story prior to the start date. As many as six of these unfinished stories will be minutely critiqued prior to our first day, and those critiques will serve as cornerstone content for the class. Every student in the class will be challenged to shape his or her point-of-registration submission into a finished story during the class. Every student will be challenged to develop a second story, as well, from first seeds of inspiration to finished product. read more »

Late last year we decided it was high time to begin thinking about our next Tshirt.  So rather than just arbitrarily picking a book of Chuck's that hadn't been featured yet, we decided to turn the mic over to you, the fans.  And so we set up a poll via Twitter and allowed people to vote on which book they'd like to see a Tshirt designed for next.  And lucky for me (because it's my favorite Palahniuk book!)

won!  So you asked for it, you got it!

Black
Order Your Rant Shirt!
 

Army
Order Your Rant Shirt!
read more »

For all you patient kiddies, today is the day you can order your own 'Rant' poster, designed by Kevin Tong.  This is the image used on the shirt Kevin also designed us, and really, it's a work of art.  This is getting framed and going on my wall.   Check out the above video of Kevin designing the image for the Tshirt and poster. 

These posters are limited edition.  Only 200 have been printed.  Once they're gone... they're gone.  They cost $30 and you can order them here.

Poster specs: It’s a 18 X 24 inch, four color, screen printed poster on 80 lb. Wausau Astrobright Cover Paper in an edition of 200, signed and numbered

Kevin Tong previously created posters for two other Tshirts he designed us:  Fight Club and Invisible Monsters.  The guy is really a genius.  If you live anywhere in the California area, you have to visit one of his shows to see his other prints.

Here is where he'll be next:

Renegade Craft Fair Los Angeles
December 11-12, 2010
11am-7pm
Los Angeles State Historic Park
1245 N Spring St
Los Angeles, CA 90012

The first ever Renegade Craft Fair Holiday Sale in Los Angeles. With over 250 of today’s finest indie-craft talents setting up shop for holiday shoppers. Admission is free.

Renegrade Craft Fair San Francisco
December 18-19, 2010
11am-7pm
Concourse Exhibition Center- East Hall
620 7th St, San Francisco, CA
Check out over 200 of the nation’s finest indie-craft talents for your last minute holiday shopping needs. Don’t miss this incredible craft, art, design and DIY event! Admission is free.

The posters are $30. 

Order Here!

Our favorite affiliates and friends, St. Helens Book Shop are having a very awesome and unique promotion.  They have recently acquired a number of foreign language books, signed by Chuck, and they are now offering them up for sale!  They are new/unread books, but have been sitting in storage at his place for several years, so they are not in pristine condition.

The books have been graded them into 4 price categories of $5 (sold out), $10, $15, and $20, based on quality and condition, and they are grouped by language within the price category.They  have cover images for many of them, but not all, so if you have any questions about the details of a particular book, feel free to email their Orders Manager at order at sthelensbookshop dot com.

So what are you waiting for?  Get over to St. Helens today!  The cut-off for Holiday orders is 12/8!

Order here!

Chuck Palahniuk's hilarious short story Knock-Knock, is featured in the December issue of Playboy.  So... yep, fellas. you now have an excuse for your woman to go buy Playboy.  If you didn't get a chance to see Chuck on his Tell-All tour, then you missed out on this story.  Chuck read it live at each event.  And you know how Guts has a few of those moments that just kill?  Well, Knock-Knock has one payoff in particular, that brought down the house.

I'll see about getting permission to post the actual short story here on the site, but that probably won't be until the magazine is long off newstands.  For now, you'll just have to be good little perverts and go pick it up in person. 

Or, just order it from their website here.

These were just emailed to us by a fan on Photobucket named Buh-Ran-Dee. If you're a member there, you can check out his/her profile here.

Note from designer: "plain white slip ons that i colored."

And sorry, folks.  But these aren't for sale. 

New Exclusive Cult Master Class

Note: Class is now officially underway. Congrats to all our students!

He takes us to the places we fear and shows us real-life monsters, sometimes through a child’s eyes.  You don’t have to cue the campy music.  You don’t have to invoke the supernatural.  You will be scared, but exhilarated, repulsed and attracted at the same time.  As Hannah Arendt told us in a book from 1963 about those who abetted the Nazi regime, the surprising thing about evil is “the banality evil.”  When you read a Jack Ketchum novel, you realize that the evil thing you fear could be living right next door, doing laundry in a faded sundress or supplying discipline to somebody’s children.  And the way the worst of it creeps up on you, seductively, before going farther than you could have imagined—you don’t sense exaggeration when Stephen King says that Jack is the writer who scares even him.  But it runs deeper than fright, deeper than scare tactics. 

What I’ve noticed in books like The Girl Next Door is that Jack consistently challenges the reader to confront and consider.  He entertains, but he also shows us something terrifying set amid everyday life.  Ultimately, you’re left with a human riddle to think about, instead of just a frenzied run to your next distraction.  Jack’s characters and the often horrifying situations they face stay with us, somehow, in the best possible way.  There’s a redemptive finish, even if it only completes itself inside of you.

This is why we’ve been after him, of course.  That chill in his own spine, that scary thing that went looking for the creator of so many scary things—it was just us.  “Trick or Treat.  The Cult has come for you, Jack.  We want you to teach us everything that you know.” 

After the second approach, Jack said ‘Yes.’  (Keep reading to grab an exclusive seat.)

Of course, there’s a bit more to the story, like the several months it took to line this up with a decent span of downtime or even half-time in his schedule:  a quiet moment to be found; a month when he isn’t due on set with the latest film adaptation of his work.

But now we’ve got him.  [Cue evil laughter here…]

For the month of November, the Master of Horror and Suspense, Jack Ketchum, is here for you at The Cult.  He will be spilling the magic beans in one of our most exciting intensives yet:

Talking Scars: Creating the Literature of Fear and Pain

What We Will Cover

• Writing from the Wound
• The Abyss that's Looking Back
• “Method Acting” for Horror Writers
• Choosing a theme for a horror or suspense story & the versatility of the form
• Horror and Suspense as Cautionary Tales
• Creating Suspense - sentence-level techniques
• The bookstore browser test for your opening paragraph
• Communicating your deeper meaning through genre fiction
• Important tips for a good writer turning pro

The Details

Talking Scars: Jack Ketchum Cult Exclusive Master Class
  Dates: November 9th – December 9th
  Hard Limit: 20 Students Only

  Class is now officially underway. Congrats to all our students!

You know the drill, folks.  Every month a new book is selected and a new moderator steps up to lead the discussion.  This month, we will be reading and discussing Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction by Luke Davies.

Here's the write-up from Amazon:

Since Trainspotting, heroin chic has certainly put down literary roots?sometimes it seems that you can't be a hip writer unless you know your way around a needle. Perhaps none has chronicled the mechanics of addiction in such mind-numbing detail as Australian poet Davies (Absolute Event Horizon) does in this strong if unimaginative first novel: Davies concentrates as much on preferred syringes as on the adventure of getting the smack, which makes the novel seem, sometimes, like Consumer Reports for junkies. The Candy of the title is both the woman that the narrator falls in love with and, of course, the stuff that he takes. Candy's degradation, from beautiful actress to call girl to streetwalker to madwoman, mirrors the narrator's own passage from a sort of smart-aleck cuteness to the monster whose main concern is finding a viable vein to prick. Starting out in Sydney, the couple moves to Melbourne to go straight but, of course, relapse. They engage in a tedious round of finding money and finding smack, in which all other attachments become peripheral. The narrator's habit of viewing these events from a distance strikes the right chord, but it's a monotone, insights notwithstanding: "Veins are a kind of map, and maps are the best way to chart the way things change. What I am really charting here is a kind of decay." The result is a more harrowing than the usual return to a familiar landscape of admonishment and self-negation.

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