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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 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.
Chuck Palahniuk’s
six previous novels are Fight Club, Survivor,
Invisible Monsters, Choke, Lullaby, and
Diary. He is also the author of a profile of Portland,
Fugitives and Refugees, and the nonfiction collection
Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in Washington State.
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