Haunted: A Novel - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach-churning stories. They’re told by people who have answered an ad for a writer’s retreat and unwittingly joined a “Survivor”-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you’ll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk.

Customer Reviews: Read 98 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Upchuck, strikes again May 2, 2006
68 out of 74 found this review helpful

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.

4 out of 5 stars

Entertaining, but not for everyone July 21, 2006
19 out of 20 found this review helpful

I know I'm in the minority, but I was never really much of a fan of the movie Fight Club. For that reason, I'd never been all that inclined to read Chuck Palahniuk, the author whose novel inspired the film. Nonetheless, reading the general description of his book Haunted was enough to pique my interest, so I picked up a copy. What I got was a book that was imperfect but reasonably entertaining.

Haunted follows a group of individuals who've joined a rather mysterious writer's workshop. For three months, they will in complete isolation from the outside world, a condition similar to what Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and others faced in the nineteenth century; that isolated group produced works like Frankenstein; who knows what this group will produce.

Unfortunately, all these characters are apparently insane and start to destroy their environment. As a result, they're trapped in a place with very limited food or other resources. As they cope with their increasingly desperate circumstances, they tell stories about themselves. These tales form the bulk of the book, and give insights into these very warped people.

Much of Haunted's stories - as well as the framing narrative - is pretty disturbing; one story is literally gut-wrenching (you'll know it when you read it). If you are expecting realistic behavior, however, this is not the book for you; all the characters and situations are absurd, but it generally works well in the context Palahniuk has designed. It is, however, the biggest problem with the story: the characters act in a way that appears so irrational that it is hard to identify with (let alone like) anyone involved.

There are several obvious inspirations for this book, from classic literature such as The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron to more modern entertainments such as Survivor or Big Brother, but Palahniuk leaves his own imprint on the concepts. This is not a book for everyone, but if you enjoy off-beat literature which can easily shock, you should enjoy this book.

1 out of 5 stars

what AIDS is to life in general, Palahniuk is to literature April 13, 2006
13 out of 47 found this review helpful

when someone you know gets AIDS you have to, unwillingly, watch them gradualy deteriorate. they turn into a shadow of their former selves, and there's really nothing, try as you might, you can do to save them from their inevitable death.

basically, this is what it must be like to watch someone you once knew as a vibrant, intelligent, insightful person turn into a mindless, pseudocynic all because they read something by this 50th rate "social commentator". nothing he's written is even mediocre, it's inching towards subpar but never really makes it.

i cannot begin to tell you, in 5,000 words or less, how much i detest this no talent hack.

his entire style is basically satire for the kids who've never read Vonnegut or Swift (ok, MAYBE they were forced to read Slaughterhouse Five in some English class, but they hated it because it wasn't violent or "witty" enough, but if Palahniuk is witty then Dan Brown is Faulkner reincarnate.)

nothing he has to say is original, funny, insightful or biting. oddly enough, in order to be a good satirist, you pretty much need said qualities.

i can just see him sitting at his laptop typing out the most trite, trivial 10th grade friendless goth rant, then smile, knowning that there are borderline literaryautistic kids out there more than willing to shell out over $20 for something they could have realized themselves, if only they could turn off the Royal Tenenbaums and maybe, i don't know, use their BRAIN.

if one more guy in his sister's pants tells me that he's an unconventional writer i'll vomit. oh boy the story, like, jumps all over the place and stuff, and one of his books starts at the last chapter and ends with the first chapter, how original. it's oh so unconventional and cool

if you've never read

Burroughs
C?line
or even Faulkner (Sound and the Fury and the short story A Rose for Emily)

in summary, Palahniuk is a hypocrite, plain and simple. if you can't see it, then there's no help for you.

2 out of 5 stars

This is not "A Novel" May 9, 2007
11 out of 15 found this review helpful

This is what's happened here, folks, if you're curious. Short story collections are very hard to sell - many bestselling authors will merely do okay with their short story collections, with a few exceptions. So what this author has done is collected a bunch of stories over the years and tried to milk the collection for the same kind of sales he'd get for a novel. The result is: some quite good shock-value short stories tied together very tenuously indeed, to a thin convoluted plot concerning not characters but a bunch of odd names. Characters? What characters? Each is identical, aside a few details we're told about, as opposed to shown. Each has identical motivation, speech, and defects. They all react identically to each situation. In reality you'd be flat out finding one person so demented he'd be willing to cannibalize others just for fame and money, yet I'm supposed to accept there are more than a dozen of them here. The book is a cynical fake, in its intent and its tone.

The passages between short stories took all my determination to keep reading. Such flat, ineffectual, insincere padding I don't think I've ever encountered before. The poems? Thankfully they were short. The short stories? They weren't all bad, although why anyone would accuse the author of possessing literary merit I don't know - it's shock value, gross-out humour. Nothing wrong with that, but there's something wrong with falsely advertising this book as a novel.

1 out of 5 stars

BORING June 19, 2006
9 out of 14 found this review helpful

One of the worst books I have ever read. After the intial shocker in the swimming pool, I read to the end, thinking there must be more to this book. There never was. I read the authors proud description of people fainting from shock when the stories were read out loud. I can't imagine someone fainting after hearing these stories, but I guess that is what the author is proud to achieve.

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