Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales youβll ever encounterβsometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined βWritersβ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,β and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of βreal lifeβ that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But βhereβ turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside worldβand 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 tellβand 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 televisionβThe Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary traditionβThe Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankensteinβto tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finestβwhich means his most extreme and his most provocative.