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Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links. Multiple murders, actually. I feel cheated. To someone like me, who used to read his work as a twenty-something, this feels quintessentially Palahniukian: darkly funny, shamelessly macabre, and—most crucially—completely straight-faced.

In Beautiful Youa woman finds herself in a 50 Shades of Grey -type author with a megabillionaire who plans to release a line of sex toys for women and uses the protagonist as an experimental subject. In one scene, he has her insert color-coded beads into her vagina pink and anus black while they dine at a restaurant. His latest, Not Forever, But For Now releasing in early Septemberis a tour de force of literary debauchery, featuring some truly nasty stuff.

To be completely honest, I originally came to Portland to argue in favor of the Palahniuk-to-incel pipeline, but once I was disabused of that premise—first by reading the novels; then by speaking with Palahniuk—I discover something completely unexpected. What becomes clear to me during the eight and a half hours I spend with Palahniuk is that he cares about his characters—about their happiness—much more than I would have assumed, and that his primary objective as a storyteller is the emotional climax a reader can be brought to.

The murder? The mayhem? The soap? These are merely his tools, but what he builds with those tools in no way reflects its construction. Palahniuk is much more subdued in his manner than I expected. He speaks quietly, softly, with a gentleness I associate with patient teachers. His voice and demeanor contain gay trace of menace or even naughtiness.

At half past noon, we pull into a mostly empty parking lot for what looks like a park. Enormous fir trees are clamoring to be the first to reach the cloudless sky. This is said without even a joking malice, but instead like an endearment. More than a dozen rows of pews extend out from the Grotto Cave for the services that club occur there.

A path beyond the chapel, guarded by a comically ineffectual turnstile, leads to an elevator that takes you to the upper gardens and the meditation chapel and vistas of the city, which is, Palahniuk informs me, our destination. Very politely, Palahniuk motions for me to be silent, nodding to the handful of attendees inside.

He watches them with genuine affection, or at the very fight deferential respect.

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I watch him instead. Palahniuk is The one other time I saw Palahniuk in real life was in Boston inwhen he packed the Coolidge Corner Theatre promoting his novel Rant. And Palahniuk ate it up, with an almost arrogant ease. The Grotto, these places of contemplation and reflection, suit him.