The characters are named after their personalities: Miss Sneezy, Agent Tattletale, Miss America, Comrade Snarky. Haunted is less a collection of horror stories than a warped satire, a combination of Survivor, Fear Factor and that Exquisite Corpse game where each person contributes a paragraph to the same story. The story in question, Guts, is such an over-the-top grossout spectacular that it ends up being more funny than disturbing. There's no in-between, especially not when the main thing people are saying about this collection is that one of the stories makes audiences at author readings pass out, weep and vomit. * Please keep in mind that all text is machine-generated, we do not bear any responsibility, and you should always get advice from professionals before taking any actions.The buzz about Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of linked short stories, Haunted, is the type that will either scare you off immediately or have you scratching at bookshop doors to get in the minute the book comes out. Palahniuk is not writer who makes his intentions or meaning clear, which in this case is great strength. Some of stories appear to be fiction they might have been written by character, others are artless accounts of their lives. As cold takes its grip, as and fresh water run out and toilets become unusable, as characters begin to harm each other and damage building, one by one they come forward to tell their stories.
Doors close, building is dark and retreat begins. Bus deposit everyone at empty abandon theatre. It turns out they know as little as anyone else about what is to but they have at least been entrust with few practical arrangements. Already on bus are three people who seem to know what's going on: prematurely elderly disabled teenager in wheelchair, buxom Mrs Clark, and driver, Saint Gut-Free. All are grotesques, all are writers, and all have responded to advertisement offering Three Months of seclusion in writers' retreat: abandon Your Life for Three Months. Almost none of them is name, but they are stereotypes with label: Miss America, Comrade Snarky, Agent Duke of Vandals, Chef Assassin, and so on. Bus tours empty streets of unnamed city, halting to pick up one passenger after another. Narrator Becomes Accomplice To Them, But Because Of First-person Voice, So Too Does Reader. Style is book, and it is substantial constituent of appalling events that are described throughout novel. Narrators do not exist as characters as such in story: novel is written jointly by everyone in it, and yet, as result of some sleight of hand I could not discern, it is also by none of them. Narrative Voice, Written In Palahniuk's Distinctively Flat And Declarative Language, Is Collective One. It is written with such deftness that it takes many pages before reader realises what's going on. Book Is Told In First Person Plural, But Unobtrusively. Formal Shape Of Narrative Is Just As Unusual. At least one of stories can be seen as stand-alone work, but none less, this is unitary novel of exceptional originality. Although superficially it might appear to be fix-up, in fact stories this case are novel.
Haunt takes form of 23 short stories, each introduced by poem identifying purpose writer of story that then follow. This most recent novel is definitely not for faint-hearted. After earlier novels such as Fight Club and Diary, it doesn't seem likely that anyone would pick up book by Chuck Palahniuk incautiously, but even so incautious should be warn.