Haunted
by Chuck Palahniuk
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Twenty-three stories chronicle the experiences of people who have answered an ad for an artist's retreat, believing that they will find a peaceful refuge, only to find themselves isolated and trapped in a cavernous old theater.Tags
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In Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk has brought together the most horrifically horrifying and horrifyingly repulsive cast of characters imaginable. They are all attending a three month writer's retreat, a basis to bring all these crazies together, that has gone awry. He takes these characters and uses them to cross every social boundary in existence. He has created a collection of stories that could only be created by Chuck Palahniuk himself; no other author would dare.
Haunted is, hands down, the most hauntingly disturbing book of short stories I have ever in my life read. Really, short stories aside, it's the most disturbing book I have ever read. I would say that each story is more extreme than the next, except that this wouldn't be true - he show more starts with a bang, throwing it all out there in his very first story, the most cringe-worthy of them all. There were seriously points during this story in which I had to stop reading for a moment, for fear that I might throw up. I think if I had kept reading, I actually would have thrown up.
After this first story, which evidentally regularly made people faint during readings, we go on to hear stories told by each and every one of the screwed up participants in the writer's retreat. They are all freakishly fascinating in their own unique way. They're each way beyond the boundaries of believable and yet, somewhere in the back of your mind, you can't help be wonder if it's based on some psycho reality. He then ends it all with a science-fiction, Martian Chronicles esque story that I found to be the most horrifying of all. It was the perfect ending for this mash-up of craziness.
This book is absolutely terrifying, not so much in that it will scare you, but in that you have to cross your fingers and pray (or whatever you do) that people like this don't actually exist in the real world. Because if they did (and they do, unfortunately) - well, that would make for one ridiculously frightening world.
In case you didn't get it from this review, I absolutely loved it. show less
Haunted is, hands down, the most hauntingly disturbing book of short stories I have ever in my life read. Really, short stories aside, it's the most disturbing book I have ever read. I would say that each story is more extreme than the next, except that this wouldn't be true - he show more starts with a bang, throwing it all out there in his very first story, the most cringe-worthy of them all. There were seriously points during this story in which I had to stop reading for a moment, for fear that I might throw up. I think if I had kept reading, I actually would have thrown up.
After this first story, which evidentally regularly made people faint during readings, we go on to hear stories told by each and every one of the screwed up participants in the writer's retreat. They are all freakishly fascinating in their own unique way. They're each way beyond the boundaries of believable and yet, somewhere in the back of your mind, you can't help be wonder if it's based on some psycho reality. He then ends it all with a science-fiction, Martian Chronicles esque story that I found to be the most horrifying of all. It was the perfect ending for this mash-up of craziness.
This book is absolutely terrifying, not so much in that it will scare you, but in that you have to cross your fingers and pray (or whatever you do) that people like this don't actually exist in the real world. Because if they did (and they do, unfortunately) - well, that would make for one ridiculously frightening world.
In case you didn't get it from this review, I absolutely loved it. show less
Responding to an add for a writers retreat, a group of damaged people harboring horrific secrets gather for three months of focused creation in an unknown location. Once there they discover they will be held against their will until the period is up so that they will have no distractions from the outside world. Seizing the opportunity, these fame-hungry publicity sluts decide to create an even more dramatic situation by strategically sabotaging their food and utility supply. Once they are discovered by the world malnourished and filthy, the will become media darlings and sell their life story for a tidy fortune.
In an ever-escalating progression of staged suffering, the contestants in this extremely dark and cynical version of survivor show more pass the time by revealing the stories of their lives. What circumstances have drawn them to this place? What are they each hiding from? All will be revealed in between removal of fingernails and spats of cannibalism.
Not for the faint of heart, these stories aim to be disturbing, picking away at all the greatest fears of mankind. All wrapped in deep layers of cynicism. Delicious. show less
In an ever-escalating progression of staged suffering, the contestants in this extremely dark and cynical version of survivor show more pass the time by revealing the stories of their lives. What circumstances have drawn them to this place? What are they each hiding from? All will be revealed in between removal of fingernails and spats of cannibalism.
Not for the faint of heart, these stories aim to be disturbing, picking away at all the greatest fears of mankind. All wrapped in deep layers of cynicism. Delicious. show less
As anyone who knows me is aware, anything I write about a Chuck Palahniuk book is going to be horribly biased, because the man is essentially my hero, he sends me crazy packages for Valentine's day (sort of) and I went and bought this book the day it was released after waiting anxiously for something like a year.
Getting those details out of the way, I still really liked Haunted. It's not one of his best books, by any means, and from a purely critical stand point, it's probably not a very good book at all, but despite it's unnecessary gruesome details and completely absurd plot-lines, I liked it.
The book is a sort of modern day Canterburry Tales, only much less excruciating to read. The characters of the novel have signed up to attend a show more three-moth writer's retreat: no distractions, no unnecessary interactions, just the time they need to complete the masterpiece of their lives. Then in good Palahniuk fashion, everything goes horribly wrong and descends into self-mutilation and some good old-fashioned cannibalism. Now, if that were the novel, I would have hated it, and perhaps had to reconsider Chuck's highly-valued position as my favorite author, but that's not what makes up the novel.
What makes Haunted worth reading are the seemingly unrelated stories that each character tells. I loved reading those, and they make the ridiculous envelope plot tolerable, and they make Haunted a good book. After all, how can you call a book where the first story has been responsible for multiple faintings a bad book?
Oh, but one thing: Chuck Palahniuk is not a poet. The "poems" he uses to describe each character still sound like his fiction. Whatever editor let him leave those in, wasn't doing a very good job of things.
Originally written 05/16/05 show less
Getting those details out of the way, I still really liked Haunted. It's not one of his best books, by any means, and from a purely critical stand point, it's probably not a very good book at all, but despite it's unnecessary gruesome details and completely absurd plot-lines, I liked it.
The book is a sort of modern day Canterburry Tales, only much less excruciating to read. The characters of the novel have signed up to attend a show more three-moth writer's retreat: no distractions, no unnecessary interactions, just the time they need to complete the masterpiece of their lives. Then in good Palahniuk fashion, everything goes horribly wrong and descends into self-mutilation and some good old-fashioned cannibalism. Now, if that were the novel, I would have hated it, and perhaps had to reconsider Chuck's highly-valued position as my favorite author, but that's not what makes up the novel.
What makes Haunted worth reading are the seemingly unrelated stories that each character tells. I loved reading those, and they make the ridiculous envelope plot tolerable, and they make Haunted a good book. After all, how can you call a book where the first story has been responsible for multiple faintings a bad book?
Oh, but one thing: Chuck Palahniuk is not a poet. The "poems" he uses to describe each character still sound like his fiction. Whatever editor let him leave those in, wasn't doing a very good job of things.
Originally written 05/16/05 show less
My second of his in a short space of time, but I'm glad I read this, after the bla-ness of Fugitives & Refugees. This was sick, thought provoking, wonderfully dark, and really well written. I loved its format more than anything - how it was short stories but as part of a bigger picture. I just know some of them are going to come back to me for years - I'll forget that I read them in this book, & forever be convinced I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had their intestines sucked out of their anus whilst wanking at the bottom of a swimming pool...
Bunch of people, aspiring writers, answer an ad: spend three months locked away together, no contact at all with the outside world, completely top secret, just write. Of course, Palahniuk seems to think, no "normal" people would agree to such an idea, and as it turns out all of them have something to hide. And as they introduce themselves, one by one, and tell their stories, everything inside the house starts to go wrong...
Haunted is a satire on modern society (of course); the culture of victimization, the glorification of suffering, every bad thing human beings can do to each other and themselves for a place in the spotlight, a confirmation that they exist and that they matter. The need to create a villain to blame for everything we do show more ourselves. The house is equal parts Frankenstein, Masque of the Red Death and Big Brother, and soon turns into one of the grisliest stories this side of... well, I kept coming back to Bret Easton Ellis and Ryu Murakami. Both of whom, I'd have to say, do a better job, even if Palahniuk does his best to outsplatter anyone out there.
It's not that the stories themselves are lacking, but the framework gets boring. Our anti-heroes are a bunch of pathetic idiots, more than willing to mutilte themselves and be able to say "Hey, look, I'm the victim here!" when the TV cameras come. I couldn't care less about them as individuals, and while the gore is interesting, it also gets incredibly repetitive; we GET it, Chuck, they're all symbols of today's mentality, yada yada yada. Just not very convincing symbols. And there's always the danger of the double-edged irony; to make fun of our thirst for scandal, blood, pain and suffering, Palahniuk has to play to those exact desires. It's a bit like (though better than) Hostel in that way; any attempt to make gore fans choke on their precious gore is bound to fail more often than it succeeds.
No, the saving grace is mostly in the short stories they tell each other. Some of which are truly great - visceral, emotional, funny as hell - and are the reason I will investigate Palahniuk further. Haunted is less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are pretty damn choice. show less
Haunted is a satire on modern society (of course); the culture of victimization, the glorification of suffering, every bad thing human beings can do to each other and themselves for a place in the spotlight, a confirmation that they exist and that they matter. The need to create a villain to blame for everything we do show more ourselves. The house is equal parts Frankenstein, Masque of the Red Death and Big Brother, and soon turns into one of the grisliest stories this side of... well, I kept coming back to Bret Easton Ellis and Ryu Murakami. Both of whom, I'd have to say, do a better job, even if Palahniuk does his best to outsplatter anyone out there.
It's not that the stories themselves are lacking, but the framework gets boring. Our anti-heroes are a bunch of pathetic idiots, more than willing to mutilte themselves and be able to say "Hey, look, I'm the victim here!" when the TV cameras come. I couldn't care less about them as individuals, and while the gore is interesting, it also gets incredibly repetitive; we GET it, Chuck, they're all symbols of today's mentality, yada yada yada. Just not very convincing symbols. And there's always the danger of the double-edged irony; to make fun of our thirst for scandal, blood, pain and suffering, Palahniuk has to play to those exact desires. It's a bit like (though better than) Hostel in that way; any attempt to make gore fans choke on their precious gore is bound to fail more often than it succeeds.
No, the saving grace is mostly in the short stories they tell each other. Some of which are truly great - visceral, emotional, funny as hell - and are the reason I will investigate Palahniuk further. Haunted is less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are pretty damn choice. show less
REVIEWED: Haunted: A Novel
WRITTEN BY: Chuck Palahniuk
PUBLISHED: 2006
HAUNTED is a collection of short stories that, interrelated, compose the greater make-up of a full-size novel, as each story is the flashback of one of the characters. Chuck Palahniuk is best known as the author of “FIGHT CLUB” which became the Fincher masterpiece movie in 1999. HAUNTED is often lauded on the “best of” lists of modern horror literature. Coupled with the fact that I’m a Palahniuk fan, and I was excited to jump into this. Unfortunately, this book just didn’t work that well for me.
The plot revolves around a group of writers who become locked inside an abandoned movie theatre by their mysterious benefactor. However, instead of trying to escape, show more they each decide that the more horrific they make their own circumstances, then the greater story they will have to tell (and, by proxy, notoriety) once they are rescued. Thus, they destroy their own food, sabotage the heating and plumbing, and invent villains amongst themselves, almost like a “Lord of the Flies” for adults.
Each character’s flashback is a short story of itself, and Palahniuk doesn’t hold back when going through the gambit of the most perverse and horrific scenarios one would dare to imagine. Indeed, in the book’s afterword Palahniuk details how on a book tour, there was a rash of people who fainted after he read excerpts of the stories.
Although the book is a satirical view of culture and human motivation, I feel the author sacrificed absorbing writing for shock and absurdity. It’s very intelligent, but also felt “preachy,” and though the characters represented all different backgrounds, they mostly were each cut from the same cloth: selfish, troubled, and redundant.
What else can I say? Palahniuk is a master, and the critics adore this book. I just found it too self-serving and not the escape into imagination that I usually seek when reading fiction literature.
Three-and-a-Half out of Five stars show less
WRITTEN BY: Chuck Palahniuk
PUBLISHED: 2006
HAUNTED is a collection of short stories that, interrelated, compose the greater make-up of a full-size novel, as each story is the flashback of one of the characters. Chuck Palahniuk is best known as the author of “FIGHT CLUB” which became the Fincher masterpiece movie in 1999. HAUNTED is often lauded on the “best of” lists of modern horror literature. Coupled with the fact that I’m a Palahniuk fan, and I was excited to jump into this. Unfortunately, this book just didn’t work that well for me.
The plot revolves around a group of writers who become locked inside an abandoned movie theatre by their mysterious benefactor. However, instead of trying to escape, show more they each decide that the more horrific they make their own circumstances, then the greater story they will have to tell (and, by proxy, notoriety) once they are rescued. Thus, they destroy their own food, sabotage the heating and plumbing, and invent villains amongst themselves, almost like a “Lord of the Flies” for adults.
Each character’s flashback is a short story of itself, and Palahniuk doesn’t hold back when going through the gambit of the most perverse and horrific scenarios one would dare to imagine. Indeed, in the book’s afterword Palahniuk details how on a book tour, there was a rash of people who fainted after he read excerpts of the stories.
Although the book is a satirical view of culture and human motivation, I feel the author sacrificed absorbing writing for shock and absurdity. It’s very intelligent, but also felt “preachy,” and though the characters represented all different backgrounds, they mostly were each cut from the same cloth: selfish, troubled, and redundant.
What else can I say? Palahniuk is a master, and the critics adore this book. I just found it too self-serving and not the escape into imagination that I usually seek when reading fiction literature.
Three-and-a-Half out of Five stars show less
What can I say about Haunted? I could recite an analysis of its structure, a number of short stories tied together by a main narrative about seventeen people on the run from something, with stories to tell, locked up together in an abandoned building for the amusement of a kid with progeria and far too much money to spend. I could talk about the disgusting premises for some of the short stories: intestines sucked down in the pool filter while masturbating, biblethumpers melting in boiling water, the gruesome murder of private detectives, nightmare boxes and other delightful themes. I could talk about the horrors of people mutilating themselves to make sure that when they're found, they'll have stories to tell far worse than the one show more they're living. Of toes, fingers, noses hacked off for fame and fortune. I could talk about the metaphors on the surface and those a few levels down. About humanity's need to suffer in order to feel like life is worth living. They're all worthy topics of discussion and review, but in the end what this boils down to is a very disturbing dissection of the human spirit in all its ugly voraciousness: we are what maims, we are what kills. We are our own suffering. show less
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Palahniuk's always been hammy, but in the past, speedster plots and glossy prose salvaged the sitcom shallowness. Here, Haunted's wonky framing device tries to hold together 23 tales (and 21 accompanying poems) that would've best been served without garnish.
added by CarlosMcRey
If books had aromas, this one would reek of "old potatoes melting into a black puddle under the kitchen sink."
added by CarlosMcRey
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Author Information
100+ Works 103,992 Members
Chuck Palahniuk was born in Pasco, Washington on February 21, 1962. He received a BA in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1986. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked as a journalist and as a diesel mechanic. He has written numerous novels including Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant, Snuff, Pygmy, show more Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You, and Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread. Fight Club was made into a film by director David Fincher and Choke was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees, a nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Contains
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Haunted
- Original title
- Haunted
- Original publication date
- 2005
- People/Characters
- Brandon Whittier; Tess Clark; Saint Gut-Free; Mother Nature; Miss America; Evelyn Keyes (Lady Baglady) (show all 19); The Earl of Slander; Terry Fletcher (The Duke of Vandals); Director Denial; Reverend Godless; The Matchmaker; Sister Vigilante; Richard Talbott (Chef Assassin); Comrade Snarky; Eugene Denton (Agent Tattletale); The Missing Link; Claire Upton (The Countess Foresight); Miss Leroy (The Baroness Frostbite); Lisa Noonan (Miss Sneezy)
- Important places
- Oregon, USA
- Related movies
- Haunted (2010 | IMDb)
- First words
- This was supposed to be a writer's retreat. It was supposed to be safe.
An isolated writer's colony, where we could work,
run by an old, old dying man named Whittier,
until it wasn't.
And we supposed to wr... (show all)ite poetry. Pretty poetry.
This crowd of us, his gifted students,
locked away from the ordinary world for three months. - Quotations
- The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. (Mrs. Clark in “Post Production: A Story by Mrs. Clark")
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Now this is my life.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"We look forward to getting you back." - Original language
- English
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- 8,316
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- 1,330
- Reviews
- 161
- Rating
- (3.40)
- Languages
- 13 — Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 42
- ASINs
- 12