It will struggle to out-gross “Guts” – the story, which caused blackouts on last year’s visit, describes the experience of a boy who sits on the extractor flue in a swimming pool. The youth finds that it sucks out his intestines, leaving him floating underwater, tethered to the floor by “a thick rope of veins and knotted guts” which he has to gnaw through to get back to the surface.Palahniuk collects books of autopsy photographs, like Damien Hirst did as an adolescent. There are times when the writer’s determination to horrify can appear – OK, is – puerile. I always surprise myself.”On his next tour, the author will be reading a new story which deals frankly with the subject of – you may be ahead of me here – paedophilia. A few have self-mutilated in homage to Tyler Durden, Pitt’s character in Fight Club – a book which, the author recently announced, may become a Broadway musical.Palahniuk’s work, advertised by his publishers as “sick”, has become increasingly morbid, visceral and determinedly revolting.”Every time I write something,” – in his words – “I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write But no.

The writer, whose fan website is called “The Cult”, is one of the few novelists who’s engrossed in his own image to a degree you might expect from a rock star. His readings attract young men who dress like – and, in some cases, want to be – him. “In another minute,” Palahniuk writes, “the arms will come around me from behind. Some stranger will be hugging me tight, double-fisting me under the ribcage and breathing into my ear: ‘You’re OK.’”Non-Fiction includes an account of the Missoula Montana Testicle Festival – the piece I was reading on the plane – an audience with singer Marilyn Manson, and Chuck’s recollections of a bargain he struck with a friend who let him watch her dissecting corpses in exchange for an introduction to Brad Pitt.Chuck Palahniuk is, admittedly, not for everybody. He is employed as a servant in “Colonial Dunsboro” – a themepark recreation of an 18th-century village, where staff are fined for anachronistic behaviour, such as chewing gum, or whistling tunes by Erasure.”The miller,” Victor notes, “is cooking crystal meth. The inn-keeper deals acid to bored teenagers who get dragged here on school trips.” The potter is on methadone; the stableboy hides headphones under his tricorn hat, “plugged in on special K and twitching to his own private rave”.In restaurants, Victor simulates choking in order to bond with, then sponge off, people who leap to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre.

The unreflecting person clumps about on the earth’s surface, but if she needs to know more about who she is and where she came from, she must dig down. As a compulsion it is modern: Jennifer Wallace, in her profound and fascinating new book, Digging the Dirt, locates its beginnings in figures such as William Stukeley, whose lively, some said fantastic, explorations of Avebury and Stonehenge in the early 18th century began the work of fleshing out our remote ancestors.
What we find when we dig down depends on where we dig. “With you – who I don’t know – I am going to be nice as pie.”"Are you sure?”He pauses. “Yeah.”Palahniuk, who is 43, has published seven books since Fight Club. Victor Mancini, whose social life revolves around sex-addiction clinics, is struggling to support his Alzheimic mother. His best writing is sparse, acutely observed and very, very funny.