And it’s a shame, because there are some really good moments in the framing story.
Once readers figure out where things are going, it’s hard for Palahniuk to pop any more surprises out of his twisted mind. It’s not that the book doesn’t have any interest (for all it’s fault, it’s impossible to stop reading), but that the reader clearly emerges on top of the author in this game of gross-out. What’s a story without heroes? ponders Palahniuk, knowing fully well that his own novel doesn’t have any. Heck, they’re not even up to the talk of being honest writers, let alone survivors. But that fun disappears quickly once the demolition derby starts and it becomes obvious that none of the characters are worth saving. It’s twisted, it’s quirky, it’s original and it’s even a little bit of fun. As long as the others do the dying, why not sabotage the heating, burn the place, spoil the food and enhance the suffering? What’s a little self-mutilation, cold-blooded murder and outright cannibalism when you can emerge from the experience with a fat film contract about your life story? Why not select a role and try to kill each other according to dramatic logic? This becomes especially obvious when the collective narrator (the “I” of the framing story is meant as a royal singular) admits that all of them would rather survive through a harrowing ordeal and write that up rather than spend any effort creating something original. On one level, you can certainly read the framing device as a warped take-off on reality television. They kill each other, they tell stories (the twenty-three short stories) and they kill each other some more. But things go wrong (or right) when everyone involved in this retreat (including the organizer and his assistant) are revealed to be latent psychopaths. In a few words, it’s about a group of “writers” isolating themselves at a retreat in order to spend three uninterrupted months writing a perfect masterpiece. What’s also unfortunate is that the framing story isn’t as strong as it could be. Grand Guignol style works, but it may work better in thirteen stories rather than twenty-three. It doesn’t help that the cumulative effect of Haunted is closer to repetition than horror. Once you figure out that people are going to die in nearly every story, it’s not difficult to guess the ending pages before it happens. At least a handful of other stories are similarly too much. “Exodus”, for instance, is almost unbearably disturbing in its depiction of a child abuse police squad turning out to be latent child abusers themselves, but at some point the story becomes so extreme that the only reaction is a chuckle and a “Oh, Chuck, you’re just trying too hard now”. Strong advance notice and if readers are liable to just read it and go “eAs with all other short story collections in the history of literature, there are a number of other stories that don’t work so well. If you’re a Palahniuk fan, you already know about it: It’s the infamous story that has caused, so far, over four dozen people to faint at public readings. Readers now expect the extreme from Palahniuk, and the man cheerfully obliges.
It takes a special kind of reader to appreciate what he’s doing with his fiction: kind of a who-blinks-first game of gross-out. Palahniuk’s universe is crammed with sociopaths and the whole point of his fiction is seeing this world through completely depraved minds. It’s more accurate to call this a fix-up, a short story collection thinly disguised by a framing device that becomes increasingly more clumsy as the narrative advances.Īs a short story collection, hey, it’s classic Palahniuk: humour and horror mixed together with a heady side-order of sadism, cynicism and post-modern detachment. Obviously, it’s his longest book to date: Whereas his previous novels all nestled comfortably under 300 pages, this one goes above 400. Haunted is arguably a departure for Palahniuk. While that tendency has been obvious for most of the author’s past books, Haunted comes closest to crossing the line at which the myth of Chuck Palahniuk may be consuming the real author. A feedback loop is created in which reputation takes over and self-parody soon follows. But at some point, believing one’s own press releases becomes a dangerous thing. His fans, his publicists and his editor all thank him for it. Doubleday, 2005, 404 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 8-0īy now, we all know that Chuck Palahniuk is one sick puppy.
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