Haunted
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Book Details
Written by Chuck Palahniuk.
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($24.95)
Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight.
Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television—The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition—The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein—to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest—which means his most extreme and his most provocative.
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DumbelinaTheDaft thinks this book is Bad.
Palahniuk's style is very formulaic. I feel like it has an expiration date; I was able to read 3 of his books before I realized how terribly derivative his writing is. I had anticipated this book because the premise seemed interesting. However, I was incredibly disappointed, and I put it down halfway through. Palahniuk interrupts the main narrative to present the various stories written by the authors on the retreat. He doesn't bother to create different writing styles for each author--how incredibly coincidental that every single writer just happens to share the same voice, and that that voice also happens to be Palahniuk's! The idea had a lot of potential, but it fell flat here. If you're looking for something good by Palahniuk, read "Invisible Monsters" instead.