Haunted : A Novel of Stories [Hardcover]

Chuck Palahniuk (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 3, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What elevates Palahniuk's best novels (e.g., Fight Club) above their shocking premises is his ability to find humanity in deeply grotesque characters. But such generosity of spirit is not evident in his latest, which charts the trials of a group of aspiring writers brought together for a three-month writer's retreat in an abandoned theater. The novel intersperses the writers' poems and short stories with tales of the indignities they heap upon themselves after deciding to turn their lives into a "true-life horror story with a happy ending." They lock themselves in the theater, reasoning that once they're found, they'll all become rich and famous. They raise the stakes of their story by first depriving themselves of phones, and then of food and electricity; eventually they cut off their own fingers, toes and unmentionables before they start dying off and eating each other. Palahniuk tells his story with such blithe disregard for these characters that it's hard not to wish he had dispensed with the novel altogether and published, instead, the 23 short stories that pop up throughout the book. For instance, "Obsolete," about a young girl about to commit state-mandated suicide, and "Slumming," about rich couples who pretend to be homeless, play so deftly with expectations and have an emotional core so surprising that they consistently, powerfully transcend their macabre premises to showcase the heart beating beneath the horrors.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

It shouldn’t surprise that Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel is a gross out. All of his books, including Fight Club, Choke, and Lullaby, have required various degrees of intestinal fortitude. Some critics note that he’s turned the corner with Haunted, a book that has "plenty of guts, but little glory" (Chicago Sun-Times). Though the Portland-based proponent of Dangerous Writing continues to deliver his imaginative stories in an appealing, deadpan prose, the flat characters, questions about his intent, and the overall gross-out factor diminish this "ad-hoc diet book" as just another workshop failure (New York Times).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (May 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385509480
• ISBN-13: 978-0385509480
• Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 5.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (378 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #204,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chuck Palahniuk's novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Lullaby, Survivor, Haunted, and Invisible Monsters. Portions of Choke have appeared in Playboy, and Palahniuk's nonfiction work has been published by Gear, Black Book, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

(What's this?)

#92 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Action & Adventure

#92 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Action & Adventure

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 82 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Churn your stomach May 1, 2006

By Steven R. McEvoy TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Chuck Palahniuk is most known as the author of Fight Club, the book that became the movie with Brad Pitt and Ed Norton; and overnight Palahniuk had a cult following. Erie, scary, and terrifying; if I had to use three words to describe this book, that would be it. Robert A. Heinlien the classic Science Fiction author once quipped "One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." Of this book I would state, "One man's perversion is another man's pleasure." This book will hit both, depending on who you are and your sensibilities.

This book is a collection of short stories, written by characters who are on a writer's retreat. They all responded to an ad to "give up three months of your life and create the masterpiece you have always said you would". Each of the 18 respondents had an idea of where they would be going - to a large country estate, a camp in the woods; yet the reality is they get locked into an old ornate theatre house. They have food, shelter, and facilities, yet all doors are locked, all windows bricked over and no way out.

From there the book becomes a cross between Fear Factor, Survivor and your most feared horror story. We see the depths to which people will descend to achieve fame and riches. Palahniuk, during the current book tour, was reading the first story called `Guts' and to date there have been 63 people who have passed out with many people being injured falling into book cases in book stores. This book will at times, turn your stomach, but will give you an understanding of the darkest side of human nature.

Readers beware! This book is like the fight club movie on super steroids.

73 of 82 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Upchuck, strikes again May 1, 2006

By Steven R. McEvoy TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Chuck Palahniuk is most known as the author of Fight Club, the book that became the movie with Brad Pitt and Ed Norton; and overnight Palahniuk had a cult following. Erie, scary, and terrifying; if I had to use three words to describe this book, that would be it. Robert A. Heinlien the classic Science Fiction author once quipped "One man's theology is another man's belly laugh." Of this book I would state, "One man's perversion is another man's pleasure." This book will hit both, depending on who you are and your sensibilities.

This book is a collection of short stories, written by characters who are on a writer's retreat. They all responded to an ad to "give up three months of your life and create the masterpiece you have always said you would". Each of the 18 respondents had an idea of where they would be going - to a large country estate, a camp in the woods; yet the reality is they get locked into an old ornate theatre house. They have food, shelter, and facilities, yet all doors are locked, all windows bricked over and no way out.

From there the book becomes a cross between Fear Factor, Survivor and your most feared horror story. We see the depths to which people will descend to achieve fame and riches. Palahniuk, during the current book tour, was reading the first story called `Guts' and to date there have been 63 people who have passed out with many people being injured falling into book cases in book stores. This book will at times, turn your stomach, but will give you an understanding of the darkest side of human nature.

Readers beware! This book is like the fight club movie on super steroids.

84 of 100 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars 2 stars for the main story, 5 stars for the short stories May 3, 2005

By D. Bakken

Format:Hardcover

I have enjoyed all of Palahniuk's past books in varying degrees. A few are worth 5 stars, the rest 4 stars, but all of them have been consistently enjoyable. Unfortunately, his new book is not consistently good.

I read somewhere in an interview that Palahniuk has originally planned this book as a novella and then would release the short stories separately. While a book of just these short stories would have been worth 5 stars, the novella about the writer's retreat could have damaged his career. I hate to say it, but it is just not very good, and not even close to what he can write.

The main story about the writers who go on the retreat is just not believable to me. In a normal Palahniuk book you meet some really weird people who do some crazy stuff but it manages to barely stay within reality. Not this book. I just can't picture people hacking off body parts, ruining their food supply, eating each other, and intentionally sabotaging their escape just to be able to cash in on the book and movie royalties about their experiences when they finally "get" out. It has some classic Palahniuk moments, but the plot is just too unreal. Also, I never found myself caring even the slightest bit for any of the characters. They could have all died or all lived and I would not have cared.

However, the book is not without merit. The characters who attend this retreat write some stories and it is these short stories that are the shining light of this book and the reason that I rated it a 4 instead of a 3. Almost all of them are good and some of them are just plain great. The now infamous story "Guts" is included, along with others that are almost as nuts.

I find it hard to criticize an author whom I enjoy so much, but I know he has the talents (proven in the past) to write something much better. The book is worth buying for the short stories (I am sure many people will also like the main story) though I can't help feeing that it could have been one of his best books if the main story had been more realistic.