Haunted

By: Chuck Palahniuk

Narrated by: Scott Brick, Marc Cashman, Erik Davies, Kimberly Farr

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 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.

©2005 Chuck Palahniuk (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[The stories] consistently, powerfully transcend their macabre premises to showcase the heart beating beneath the horrors." (Publishers Weekly)

Meh

The first hour was great, shock horror left me cringing from the boy in the pool. After that is was a jumble of mediocre horror stories trying to tie it together with a bunch of writers locked in a house.

Vile, weird, and funny all in one

Where does Haunted rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Ok, this was my first Palahniuk book, but I really liked it. It was vile (Sir Gut Free), weird (Lady Baglady), and funny all in one. This is the way I like books. I also like that it's 23 short stories all lumped into one main story. I will certainly read Palahniuk again.

What other book might you compare Haunted to and why?

There is no book like this one.

Which scene was your favorite?

I had several favorites from the different short stories. But, I would have to say Cora getting her revenge on her co-workers was one of the best.

Who was the most memorable character of Haunted and why?

Oh wow, I can't say. I liked many of them for different reasons.

Wow, just wow..

Hang in there, Chuck brings it full circle as he always does.

His endings never disappoint!!!

-D.W.H.

Loved it!!!

Absolutely loved it!!! I read this book for the 1st time around 2007 and couldn't put it down then either.

A mixed bag

Some of the stories are excellent, but others dragged on. Be forewarned that most of the stories are fairly dark and disturbing.

I dont love it.

I'm half way through and im considering not finishing it.
it's hard to follow

Now I know I'm not the only strange person

"You feed me my own ass!" Wow what a brilliant horror satire of the state of Americans. The ultimate reality TV story.

Modern Horror at its best!

Stories to horrify and make you cringe!
So often I felt sick with the feeling of being in the scenes. Plum deep into the darkest depths of human imagination and on a bookshelf in the study will be "Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk.

There's a haunting story here for everyone!

This book is not a ghost story. But man will it haunt you.

As each character tells their story they are haunted by things that have happened, by past relationships, by past failures, by past mistakes etc. And they run the gamut from sad to terrifying. I truly believe there is a story within these pages that will stick with any reader for the rest of their lives.

Mine is the boy in the pool. What will yours be?

Wild ride

This was a wild story but stories within stories. People lured to a millionaire’s home that all have some thwarted past and many stories to tell about how they came to be, but the situation goes awry. It’s as if people are confessing sins while also playing hunger games too.

Some stories are gruesome and some are so crazy it’s unbelievable. There are so many motifs to society but also just a fun ride!