Signed in Blood

There's been a fair bit of discussion over the last week or so about book signings and how onorous authors feel they are, Abebooks Reading Copy blog has turns up some amusing anecdotes :

From those who are incredibly successful…

There’s a shocking story about Stephen King signing books in a Seattle shop. He signed for hours until his shoulder ached and a publicist had to apply an ice-pack. Then his fingers dried up; they cracked and began to bleed, and he asked for a bandage. Hearing this, a fan in the queue demanded to have some authentic Stephen King blood on his book. Others joined in and he signed in his own blood for hours. Chuck Palahniuk, the modern gross-out novelist, author of Fight Club, recalls a visit to a store in Austin, Texas, where the staff dished out free beer to the signing queue, and where an aggressive queuer, possibly not Chuck’s greatest fan, demanded of a quaking employee: “Why should I wait in this long line to get my books signed by that dickwad?”

and those who are not…

Jonathan Coe, author of What a Carve Up! and The Rain Before It Falls, recalls two encounters at a signing in Brighton: one woman picked up his new novel, read the author’s biog on the back flap and sniffed, “Is that your only claim to fame?” When he said, “Yes,” she replaced the book without another word. The other was a girl student who said brightly, “Can I ask you a question? Why are all your women characters so crap?”

Humourist David sedaries, author of the bestselling When You Are Engulfed In Flames has a pretty unique way of handling signings he expalins in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Two years ago, he offered priority signing for smokers and was unsuccessfully sued by one disgruntled fan for discriminating against non-smokers. "My main thought was 'What are you doing in my audience? Who let you in?"', he told SiT's bookworm, Kelsey Munro. "So next time I offered priority signing to men under 5 foot 6."

... With popularity has come protracted book signings. "Something happens around seven hours and you become silly. In this one woman's book, I drew a plank. Then it looked like it would be a sign, like you'd have in a yard. So I wrote 'Abortions, $3'. She was upset, so I changed it to $13. It was already drawn. What else could I do?"

Cover Stories

Most authors don't have any say in the cover design for their books, but some of the big names do. This essay from the New York Times features three authors, Philip Roth, Haruki Murakami and Chuck Palaniuk,who have chosen to stick with particular designers.

I have to say that I really love John Gall's retro covers for Murakami ... but the other two do rather leave me cold.

Hardtalking Palahniuk

Was much impressed with Chuck Palahniuk on Hardtalk with Gary Esler, shown this afternoon on BBC World. He looked a little like Ralph Fiennes playing Oscar in Oscar and Lucinda, I thought. Gentle. A little geeky. Definitely fun. (The duck is so nice, I now desire the pate ... to mess about with Margaret Atwood's quote.)

Anyway, to make you happy I scribbled down some notes and here are some of the facts I learned about Palahniuk and his work:

• He writes to entertain himself and is easily bored ... so he likes to shock.
• He recalls doing public readings in bars where you had only 7 minutes to make the audience laugh and make them cry.
  
• He says that reading books relies on the constant consent and effort of the consumer in a way which is not true of movies and TV.
• People faint at readings of Haunted. At almost every venue there has been at least one person hit the floor.
• At his readings people come up to him and tell him stories they have never told anyone before.
• He says the success of Fight Club changed his life only in so far as it gave him permission to be with people (giving readings and talks).
• He started writing when he joined a writer's group (for the friendship and free wine) for which the price of admission was a piece of work.
• He wroteFight Club as a kind of male version of books like The Joy Luck Club, Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt which emphasise feminine solidarity. He wanted to write a similar book about something that pulled a group of men together to tell their stories.
• He reckons a great deal of popular culture died after 9/11 as transgressional acts were no longer looked upon as being funny.
• The film of Fight Club didn't do well when it was initially screened in cinemas. It began to sell well as a DVD, when news about it spread from person to person on the internet.
• Fight Club sold to the kind of people who normally wouldn't set foot in a bookstore. A record number of copies were stolen.
• He loves readings, which he sees as an excuse for people to come together.
• He says that his narrative technique is based on oral story telling. Too many people read stories as if they are written on the page. They should learn things like timing, delivery and rhetoric from stand-up comedians.
• His sense of horror probably springs from family events. His grandfather shot his grandmother and then committed suicide. As children, he and his siblings used to sleep in the room where the murder took place. His father was murdered by the ex-husband of his girlfriend who is now on death row, threatening that he has planted anthrax bombs and they will explode if he is executed.
• When people tell me I'm extreme, Palahniuk says, they have no idea how extreme these things really are.

The Comforts of Horror

The cycle horror story is comforting the same way porno is comforting: you already know how they're going to end. The actor will achieve a loud orgasm or die ...

In the Guardian, Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk talks about the comfort to be derived from the untimely deaths of characters in horror stories.

What's a cycle horror story? Palahniuk points to the example of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery:

In 1948, when the New Yorker magazine first published , that one short story drew letters from readers in 25 states and six countries outside the US. People complained of losing sleep owing to nightmares, and cancelled their subscriptions.

Oh miraculous internet! I found a link to the story so you can fright yourselves to death.

Or, if that doesn't work, Palahniuk's new book Haunted sounds deliciously gruesome. According to the blurb on the Random House website, it's a novel:

... made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter-sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months," and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But "here" turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world-and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell-and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight.

Here's an extract to whet your appetite. (I'm so desirous of this book my hands are shaking, delerium tremours of the bookaholic.)

Oh, and Ms. D? I've just had second thoughts about that writer's retreat we were planning!