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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Make no mistake: Haunted is a haunting novel. Chuck Palahniuk's amalgam fiction begins with a Dantesque ad invitation: "Artists' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months." Then, like a macabre, twisted reality TV version of The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron, the tale spins out of control. In 23 stories, the willing participants in this increasingly diabolical communal experiment share sadistic particulars of their loathsome lives, as the author of Choke and Fight Club spices his gothic horror with trenchant social criticism.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 "Artists' 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 desperate 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 certainly be made from their plight.

Haunted is at 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

One of Palahniuk's more sweeping and macabre offerings, this is a collection of 23 short stories and poems generated at a fictional writer's retreat turned grotesque survival camp. The pieces range from the stomach-turning to the satirical or the absurd. The seven readers tackling the decidedly offbeat Palahniuk are, for the most part, refreshingly successful. Cashman is a standout, narrating the action at the retreat. His voice shuttles nimbly between the male and female writers, while maintaining the integrity of his own unnamed character. Morey's narration is disappointing on "Guts," the novel's most notorious and gruesome tale, which has reportedly caused some listeners to faint. Morey sounds too mature and polished for this series of wicked adolescent masturbatory nightmares. In general, the multivoiced narration is practiced and professional, with the trio of actresses turning in particularly strong performances. The other side of all that spit and polish is that Palahniuk's humor is occasionally stifled. Some listeners may wonder whether the author's prose is so singular that only he might be capable of delivering it. But overall, an engaging, albeit lengthy, listen. Simultaneous release with Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 21). (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Sixteen bizarre characters with appellations like Comrade Snarky, Chef Assassin, and Mother Nature voluntarily lock themselves away from the world in an abandoned theater to write, ostensibly amid no distractions. Their short stories and poems make up half of Palahniuk's latest novel (after Diary) and may or may not be their back stories; the rest of the tale centers on a cast of lunatics who sabotage their own environment and destroy their own food and life-support mechanisms until they are reduced to cannibalism in what self-consciously becomes a parody of reality television shows like Survivor. Palahniuk casts aside all constraints in this twisted saga of antagonists without a protagonist. 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 public library readers with strong stomachs and morbid dispositions. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/05.]-Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews