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"Before you know it as the years go by, you're just like other people you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it? These things occupy the place where a man's soul should be." -- Henderson the Rain King

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Haunted

Book #27 of 2005 was Chuck Palahniuk's new novel Haunted.

Haunted is a horror story structured as a collection of poems and 23 short stories, with narrative chapters interspersed throughout to keep the story moving. The plot revolves around a group of writers who answer a vague ad about a writer's retreat. At the retreat they hope to abandon the pressures of their everyday lives for three months and settle down to write their masterpieces. When they arrive at the retreat, they find themselves locked into an empty old theater and isolated from the outside world. Unhappy with the situation and feeling deceived, the writers begin to turn on one another and blame the retreat organizer/host for kidnapping them. In hopes of garnering more sympathy when they are rescued from the 'kidnapping', the writers begin to sabotage the situation by doing things like destroying their food supply, breaking the building's heating system, and inflicting torture on one another.

The more desperate the circumstances become, the more devious their schemes to worsen the situation become. Each character fantasizes about the way they will be portrayed in the Hollywood version of the story, jockeying with one another in an attempt to ensure that they will be the star by virtue of their suffering.

Palahniuk has always had a reputation as a shock novelist, but in the previous books that I've read I always felt that his style has added to the overall story. Fight Club was awesome because it was shocking and different. Haunted on the other hand feels like a novel completely structured around the idea of providing as many gross moments as possible. Some of the short stories are interesting as individual pieces, but in reading the whole novel it seemed like the narritive was mostly just a plot device to get from one gross story to another.

If you're already a big fan of Chuck's work you might still find this one enjoyable, though I would rate it at the bottom of the list of his books that I've read. If you're looking for a good starting point for Chuck, I'd definitely skip this one and go for Fight Club, Lullaby or Choke instead.
"Even the cannibalism is kind of boring" - Elizabeth Hand in Washington Post review

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posted by Jamie at 11:55 PM