Travel & Leisure

The Book That Changed My Life

Writer Chuck Palahniuk shares the book series that hooked him

Way back in the '70s, there was a really short-lived TV series called Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton, Timothy Hutton's father. Jim Hutton played Ellery Queen, who solved all these murders every week. The TV series was canceled, but I liked it so much that I started reading the books. There are hundreds of those mysteries—written by a pair of writing partners, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, until one of them died and the series continued with replacement writers—and I could never read them all. There was a short story in which all the clues were based on Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter." These things that seemed random were shoes and ships and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. It was that kind of reveal that really hooked me. It made me recognize that most books and movies work as a series of withholds and reveals. There is this constant tension of revealing the story a little bit at a time and not just blurting everything out in the beginning.

Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Snuff , was published in May by Doubleday.