The Fight Club author and spell-check favourite lulls us into a false sense of security.

Chuck Palahniuk’s defining moment in the public eye came with David Fincher’s movie adaptation of Fight Club, which had Daily Mail readers choking on their popcorn. But while the film brought cries of “cheerfully fascist” and an “assault on personal decency”, it also thrust one of today’s most daring and original authors out of the cult and into the public imagination.

Where previously publishers had pussyfooted around Palahniuk’s work (Invisible Monsters, his first novel, hadn’t been published), Fight Club tapped into people’s appetite for dark humour mixed with anarchic philosophy. In disrupting social norms, Fight Club’s protagonists found something more meaningful in their lives, and Palahniuk found an enthusiastic audience for his writing.

Following this was Survivor, in which a cult leader tells his life story to the black box of a plane he’s about to crash, inventing himself in the face of immortality. Invisible Monsters, having been unanimously rejected, suddenly became publishable shortly after, proving that there’s nothing like dollar signs to change a publisher’s mind.

Next up was Choke, where another unlikely hero pretends to choke in restaurants and relies on the compassion (ie, cheques) of his saviours to pay for his mother’s nursing home. As in Fight Club, rehab meetings feature as the former sex addict swings by sexaholics meetings because they’re the best place to pick up women, naturally.

In a suitable twist of irony, Palahniuk’s offensive and non-conformist writing has proved to be popular with the kind of money-grabbing corporations at the receiving end of his satire – movie companies. He’s now a hot Hollywood commodity, with the film version of Survivor in development and rumours floating around of Choke and Invisible Monsters adaptations. Tyler Durden would be proud.

Lullaby is his latest offering and takes a step back from the radical identity crises that defined previous transgressive characters, moving instead into the realms of horror. At its centre is an ancient culling song which, when read aloud, kills those who hear it. With the song lodged in his head, a journalist becomes an involuntary serial killer as he seeks to destroy the poem before its true nature is discovered.

Likened to literature’s darkest writers, including DeLillo, Ballard and Vonnegut, Palahniuk has made a name for himself giving readers the kind of warped view they don’t expect, but turn out to enjoy. What’s going on inside his head is anyone’s guess, although the most pressing question must surely be how the hell you pronounce his name. LB 26 September 02

Lullaby is out now, punblished by Random House.