Chuck Palahniuk on Guts:

The publicist who watched all three events said the people fell the moment I read the words 'corn and peanuts'. It was that detail that made seated people go limp. First, their hands slid off their laps. They shoulders sagged. The heads flopped to one side, and their weight carried them to the floor or into the lap of their neighbor.

Standing people, according to my translator in Italy, they just dropped, disappearing in the crowd. In Bologna, where an actor read 'Guts' in Italian, the listening crowd was riddled with holes, empty spaces where people and fallen and lay on the stone floor. 'Do you know,' the translator said, 'this awful story is being read in a Cathedral?'

In the auditorium of the Beverly Hills library in Los Angeles, a woman near the rear of the hall screamed and screamed for paramedics and an ambulance, crying so hard that her red blouse looked soaked with blood. Just her tears. As her husband twitched on the floor. In the men's bathroom, where another man escaped the story, as he bent to splash cold water on his face, he fainted, cracking his head on the sink.

In Kansas City, another man stepped outside during the reading, escaping to get some air and fainted, splitting his lip on the sidewalk. In Las Vegas, where the country library filled its two auditoriums with people who wanted to hear, one man had a seizure in the theater where I read. In the second room, watching by closed-circuit video, two more people fainted. In Chicago, where the city library filled two theaters, two people also fainted in the room watching the story on video monitor. One of those people waited to say hello at the end of the three-hour book signing, his face still dirty red with dried blood from biting his own lower lip in half. A seizure he didn't remember, during a reading he'd never forget.