Product Description

"Haunted" is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them to be precise. Twenty-two of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter - sometimes all at once. They are told by the people who have all answered the ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They 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 theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, 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/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight. "Haunted" is at one level a satire of reality television. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12441 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
"* 'A triumph...A novel of exceptional originality...Wonderful...A remarkable book, the most original work of fiction this year' - Guardian * 'One of the most popular novelists in the world...His fiction hits a nerve...Haunted breaks new ground...it is by turns nauseating, darkly funny and brutaly graphic' - Observer * 'An immensely skilful writer' - Daily Telegraph * 'Deeply satirical, brutal and provocative, Haunted is harshly compulsive, eye-bleeding stuff' - I-D"

Daily Mail, Simon Shaw
I laughed until my ribs ached.

From the Publisher
The eagerly anticipated and completely outrageous new novel from the author of Fight Club - his biggest, darkest, most upsetting and hilarious novel yet.

Customer Reviews

short stories brilliant!
I have to be honest, the short stories are superb, however the content between the shorts gave me the impression of some bad B movie, all sat round...one with a tape recorder...one with a video camera...but them it gets deeply...deeply twisted and I loved it!!!

Not his best effort
I've read most of CP's books to date, and enjoyed most. This is not one of his good ones.
There are some gems, some images and short stories that stay with you but the frame story sucks, the characters all have the same voices and the overall plot does not deliver. It would have been a better book in the short story format instead of this half baked idea to collect them together.
If you're a fan, you'll read it anyway, if you're not try one of his other books.

Sticks with you
Palahniuk goes a long way to drive home a simple point. The point being that we don't need fictional monsters to scare us; Frankenstein, Dracula, Bloody Mary... they all pale in comparison to what you and I are capable of. This is the premise he sets early on, and then he proceeds to drive home his point with one disturbing story after another.

And while most of the stories were well executed, I couldn't help feeling manipulated. Like Palahniuk was so intent on making his point that he abandoned all sense of finesse in favor of blunt force trauma. Gone was the tightly controlled, sophisticated rage of his past work, and in its place was a kind of unleashed, unfocused fury.

That said, I'd still recommend this offering to those with a strong constitution. It's personally not my favorite work of his but, as with any Chuck Palahniuk books, it leaves a lasting impression. And trust me, like it or not, this one sticks with you.