Chuck Palahniuk Does Not Attend Fight Club

Sting's album ''Brand New Day'' is in the CD player of Palahniuk's pickup truck. Wearing a Boston terrier T-shirt in honor of his two pups, Imp and Chick (Manson owns Boston terriers too!), he's driving up to Hood River, Wash., to show off an $800,000 castle he's interested in buying. Depending on whether the movie rights to Diary sell, Palahniuk hopes to purchase the castle and turn it into a writers' colony. ''Boy, I'd like to create a structure for my old age, since I don't have kids,'' he says. ''And also to provide that for other people as well, so that there's a sort of faux family of people devoted to a common passion.'' The fifth floor of the castle is a beautiful open space, with four skylights, that looks down on the White Salmon River. ''Can you imagine a better space for a workshop or a reading?'' he asks, bouncing on the balls of his feet. ''People would pee.... Manson would love this! He would pee!''

''Writing gave me the world,'' Palahniuk explains later, so he wants to extend a hand to other frustrated scribblers. If he hadn't hit it big with ''Fight Club,'' he'd be just another schmuck clocking in at some crappy job. ''I would be a really alcoholic person because that's really big in my family,'' he says. ''Until I started writing, every Friday was about going out for that big act of denial where you drink so much that you forget the fact that you have to go to work on Monday morning.'' Now he wakes up every day at 4 a.m., ready to wrestle with his passion for patterns and words. He listens to the same song on repeat, maybe Radiohead's ''Creep'' or, for ''Diary,'' Depeche Mode's ''Little 15.'' He's happiest when he's onto an idea for a new book, so he's going to keep cranking out one or two a year.

Life is sweet. So much more than his blue-collar roots, his working-class days, could have predicted. But the pressures of celebrity nip and bruise. Like Manson, Palahniuk takes heat when kids copycat. ''A lot of 4-H clubs on the East Coast,'' he says, ''they decided not to raise sheep. They decided to have fight clubs instead, and now it's a big scandal and I'm getting blasted for turning 4-H into a fight club.'' He swears he doesn't get puffed up by such acts of imitation. ''It depresses me a little that people are so unoriginal...they're modeling their acting out after this prepackaged commodity.''

Then there's the righteous finger-pointers who take shots when he doesn't live up to his anarchistic alter egos. Last year, ''The New Yorker'' hosted a reading party, and Palahniuk says he didn't know Bacardi had sponsored the event. When his mug later showed up in a rum ad, some fans cried sellout, and the alternative press ran articles carping that Tyler Durden would never shill liquor.

And there's the endless touring, where long days end at midnight with damp club sandwiches in indistinguishable hotel rooms. Despite his gleeful performances, Palahniuk discourages his friends from attending his events. He's tired of the dog and pony show. ''You start to sort of read without reading it,'' he says. ''Boy, that's easy to do with some of my 'Fight Club' stuff. You just run it off like a little tape machine, or a Teddy Ruxpin.''

He spends hours each day personally answering reader mail, sometimes including odd packages with Jesus night-lights and cheap rhinestone jewelry. But then people want second and third letters. They want intimate relationships. So at a recent University of Oregon book event, he had to think fast to shut a fan down. ''We're in this huge auditorium, full of people,'' he remembers. ''A kid way up in the top says, 'Sooo, uh, Mr. Palahniuk. Could you tell us something about your private life, maybe your private sexual life?' In front of 1,800 people! And it felt like, Okay, I have to think on my feet, what a great, fun challenge. So, I'm like, I was so proud of this, 'Well, actually, uh, I've chosen not to talk about those aspects of my life, blahblahblah, but what did you have in mind?' It was such a funny turnaround, it got a huge laugh. The kid was mortified.''

Turnarounds are a gas, especially when you get your pals in on it. ''When reporters call my friends, my friends start lying: 'Ah, yeah. He lives in a castle! He's a heroin addict!' And so they tell these contradictory stories, so it's fun for them.'' When the press makes references to Palahniuk's wife, everyone has a big giggle. ''My lovely wife!'' he smiles. In fact, Palahniuk has no wife, and declines to discuss his personal life on the record, preferring to keep his fans guessing (which they're not shy about doing). ''I just don't want the spotlight pulled away from my work,'' he says.

The cult grows. On Aug. 26, when Diary hit stores, www.chuckpalahniuk.net received more than 250,000 hits. Aspiring filmmaker Dennis Widmyer has run the website, which is now advertised on Palahniuk's book-jacket flaps, out of his parents' home in Hicksville, Long Island, since 1999. He says he's not obsessed with the author; if he's obsessed with anyone, it's the model Milla Jovovich, thank you very much. But he doesn't have a steady job, nor does he make any real money from the site, even though he spends the majority of his days online.

The message boards are rabid, with topics like ''Has Chuck Changed?'' and ''What Would You Do If Chuck Killed Himself?'' The typical Cult member is a teenager, says Widmyer. ''They're young, they're naive, and their first dose of literature, real literature, is a guy like Chuck. And it's very liberating for them, and almost turns into a religion. They can get so wrapped up in some philosophy that Chuck puts in his book that if Chuck does anything to go against that philosophy, he's a total hypocrite and should be burned in hell.'' Later on, with five IM sessions about Palahniuk going, Widmyer says, ''I think this world he created is now coming to get him.''

Palahniuk doesn't go to the website. Too creepy. He already has enough on his mind, without worrying what people are saying about him behind his back. He suffers badly from insomnia. His record is 15 days. Sleep eludes him, and always has. ''My parents used to fight a lot,'' he says, ''and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting. Yeah, ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' really masks that! So in a way I just hated falling asleep with all that unresolved tension in the next room.''

It was during a mean bout of sleeplessness that he stumbled upon the idea for ''Fight Club.'' These days, when he's staring sandy-eyed up at the ceiling, he'll pretend that he's falling asleep in God's hand (Palahniuk was raised Catholic). Or he pretends that he's dead. ''I'm dead. I'm in a casket. I don't have to do anything. All the pressure is off. Every time I breathe out, I'm going to be more relaxed. I focus on the 'You're dead, boy, all bets are off, everything's okay and it doesn't matter.'''