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)

Savage, Ugly, Harsh, Negative, Yet Good Literature

Warning: This book is not for most. It is not a horror story in the sense of good versus evil. It is instead about all that is evil, dark, corrupt, selfish, ugly, and self centered about ourselves. The only thing that makes it readable and good literature is that the author uses great language, he lays naked all we don't like about ourselves, and he is brutally honest about much of what we don't want to see. Its a ugly journey but one that some can come away from knowing more about themselves in order to become better people.

As you can see from the more disgusted reviews...

...this is Palahniuk at his best. Good to see him back in top form after a weaker novel or two, and finally he's trying something slightly new with the novel-in-stories format, allowing him to stretch his imagination a little more.

Also, this recording includes "Guts," which Palahniuk's been doing at readings for a year or two. It's worth the download just for that story, along with several other notables, such as "Exodus."

Wonderful!

Superior set up, many comical/horrific stories with an underlying satire on humanity. I loved it!

Not for the fainthearted

Well read, well written and horrific in the stomach churning sense, but sometimes you just have to turn it off and take a breath...

Disturbing

This book is only of particular taste to read. However, it expands your thoughts and immagination beyond what is comfortable for the average reader. It is kind of like a modern day Tales from the Crypt if you like that sort of reading.

Hilarious if you've got the stomach for it

Someone else commented on this as The Canterbury Tales meets And Then There Were None. That's a pretty good capsule description, if Chaucer or Christie had as sick an imagination as Palahniuk. If you can get past the squeamishness, you'll notice that Palahniuk is simply taking our everyday quirks to their extremes and in the process showing us a lot about ourselves we probably don't want to know. Whether we come away with a better understanding of humanity is another story. Someone else commented that they couldn't empathize with any of the characters in this book. I think they're all deserving of empathy, and that is a challenge to reader to see how much they can get in touch with their own darkside.

Vile but intriguing

Five minutes into this book, I thought it was going to be irritating. Fifteen minutes later I thought it was going to be revolting. Four hours later it has stopped irritating me, I still thought it was revolting, but couldn't switch it off.
If you don't like hearing about self-mutilation, sexual deviancy and the most depraved human behaviour you won't enjoy this book.
However, the author is extremely talented, and the actors narrating the book are excellent. Not one to give your granny.

Breathtaking!

A monstrous fugue. Unsurpassed style. Perhaps the best book ever written.

Bloody Brilliant

Definitely not for the everyone. Be prepared for the taste of bile in your mouth, and a bit of nausea deep in your gut. Then, when you're about as disgusted as you think you can get, you'll realize... this story is real. One need only watch a minute of reality television to see that this is how we truly treat each other. It's disturbing. Haunting. I loved it.

Gross but good

This book was a little difficult for me to follow in the beginning. The stories were a far out and hard to get into. But it out midway through I realized what the whole story was about and enjoyed it rather immensely. The narrator‘s for this book were great at depicting the characters in the story is.