Last year, author Chuck Palahniuk spilled the beans to a very excited crowd at New York’s Comic Con that he had a Fight Club sequel in the works. Unfortunately, he wasn’t referring to a new big screen adventure for Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter, as he meant that he’d be picking up the story of the narrator and Marla Singer, 10 years after they tied the knot, in a new graphic novel.
As Palahniuk gets set to speak on a panel with Fight Club director David Fincher at San Diego Comic Con on Saturday, he opened up about the next chapter of his beloved story to USA Today, and now it appears that Tyler Durden will be haunting and influencing the mind of the narrator’s 9-year old son. According to Palahniuk, Tyler wasn’t merely a figment of one man’s imagination, but he’s instead something far greater that has been around for a long, long time. Project Mayhem is still around as well, and it’s safe to assume that dad’s creation is drawing Junior in.
The original book was “such a tirade against fathers — everything I had thought my father had not done combined with everything my peers were griping about their fathers,” says Palahniuk, 52. “Now to find myself at the age that my father was when I was trashing him made me want to revisit it from the father’s perspective and see if things were any better and why it repeats like that.”
Every age has its own crisis, too, and when Palahniuk wrote Fight Club, it was that of a man moving from being the obedient child to a college graduate with heavy student-loan debt who couldn’t really make it as a writer.
Now though, there is a crisis of middle age, “where you’ve made it to a certain extent,” he says. “You’re still not really happy but for different reasons. Also the idea that if you suppress that wild, creative part of you — that Tyler part of you — do you lose the best part of you? Sure, your life is more stable and safe, but is it a better life?” (Via USA Today)
The 10-issue series is being published by Dark Horse and illustrated by Cameron Stewart, and it will be available beginning in May 2015. In case you’re wondering whether or not the narrator finds himself getting back into the action and whipping up a few knuckle sandwiches in some musky, blood-stained basement, Palahniuk admitted that there’s at least one fight club scene. That’s good, because otherwise the name would just be silly.