Synopses & Reviews
Haunted 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.
Review
"[W]hile a number of the stories here are ingenious, in a devilish sort of way, the constant barrage of wicked sadism soon palls. Stomach-churning horror that takes a bit too much joy in its diabolic machinations." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"None of Chuck Palahniuk's books are for the faint of heart. But Haunted may be his most outrageous yet....Palahniuk's stories in Haunted all explore...the seemingly unappeasable human hunger for narrative and what it teaches us about the human heart." St. Petersburg Times
Review
"[An] over-the-top gore fest....[S]ometimes very clever and pitch-black funny. But Haunted provokes a lot more nausea and eye rolls than deep thoughts....[T]his novel will please Palahniuk's hardcore fans and few others." Booklist
Review
"Mr. Palahniuk all but dares the reader to be seasick....Like Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz, he can turn the revenge of the nerds into a bold feat of liberation. Or he can throw in one dead dog too many, which is what happens here." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Review
"The short stories would work if taken singly and at intervals, but strung together they become a catalog of atrocities. Palahniuk is a clever and inventive writer, but this book is recommended only for...readers with strong stomachs and morbid dispositions." Library Journal
Review
"To produce a tract on the cultural depravity that's devouring culture, Palahniuk would have been better off writing a snappy essay; as for this work of fiction, even the most ardent of his fans may have trouble mucking through this world of ingrates." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Palahniuk's latest is not the best of his work, but it is not the worst, either. Devoted fans of his creepy hyper-reality fiction will surely find something in it to recommend this work..." BookReporter.com
Review
"Frequently entertaining [and] often appalling....There are paragraphs here entire pages, in fact that are as disgusting as anything I've ever read. Truly vivid and harrowing (and often quite funny)." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"[A]ll the characters share the distinctively choppy writing style of Chuck Palahniuk, as well as his grim world view and fetishistic attraction to suffering....I've recommended this book to a few people, but they are all a little bent." Seattle Times
Review
"All of the stories are written in pretty much the same style and tone, and while the writing occasionally has a certain bug-zapping crispness to it, it's not nearly as amusing as the author thinks....Haunted has plenty of guts, but little glory." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Nothing mere about it: Haunted is crap of a high order, flung fresh against the wall and obsessively smeared by a deeply troubled fellow. As his cardboard characters' internment gets more grim no heat, no food, no exit Chuckles performs his standard striptease: grotesque sex, murder, self-mutilation, and cannibalism." Scott Raab, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopsis
Made up of 23 of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales readers will ever encounter, Haunted is Palahniuk at his finest which means his most extreme and his most provocative.
About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk's six novels are the bestselling Diary, Lullaby, and Fight Club (which was made into a film by director David Fincher), Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke. He is also the author of the nonfiction profile of Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, published as part of the Crown Journeys series, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in Washington State.