Hey folks, Harry here with the latest Chuck Palahniuk 'story'. Seems according to this unconfirmed rumor - We might be getting this brought to us soon. Although, for it not to be formally announced and allegedly set to start shooting this month... seems odd. Or maybe i just missed an announcement. Here ya go...

Hi Harry;

Long time reader, first time informer, yada yada. I interviewed Chuck Palahniuk last Monday in Vancouver, and he drop this doozy, I don't know if it's old news, but I can't recall reading it. His novel 'Choke' will start filming this March, with Susan Sarandon as the Mother and Ryan Gosling and Heath Ledger fighting for the lead. The team of 'Constantine' is behind this adaptation.

My opinion: Sure, Ledger is huge right now, but Gosling seems more appropriate for the character.

Cheers,

Call me Mancini.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, here's Amazon's breakdown of the novel:

Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.

"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.

Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."

Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know." --Bob Michaels