Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk: A Review
More Transgressional Fiction From Fight Club Author
Nineteen miscellaneous writers are lured by a man named Whittier to a writing retreat promising time and space for the penning of masterpieces. They are to bring only their most prized possessions, those items they cannot write without: bowling balls, cats, incense, makeup, etc. They are expecting paradise. They are wrong.
Transgressional Fiction
Haunted (Anchor Books 2006) is another of Palahniuk’s establishments into Transgressional Fiction, though some claim the genre dead. The premise of such is this: characters employ themselves in anti-social endeavors to regain a base humanity and instinct they feel abandoned by progression and industry. In Haunted, society is the writers group, locked away in an abandoned theater. Each member is instructed by Whittier, their benefactor, to write a masterpiece. Their food and heat are slowly taken from them as Whittier, an old emaciated man, prods them with ever-worsening conditions to write great material. And ultimately each sees the group perversely, as it slowly implodes, as material for their writing. The worse the situation, the better their stories will be. They are reality television written.
Style/Form
Haunted is a novel in short story construction. Palahniuk has experimented again, constructing a series of short stories by writers entangled in a story of their own. Characters are introduced each in a short poem, penned by an anonymous narrator, which leads into that character’s short story: what each have created within the group. We get the impression early on that each writer survives the ordeal, or their material has been rescued by surviving members, as Haunted is the ultimate work birthed by the group. Woven within the collection of short pieces exists the story of the writers, their interactions, their coping mechanisms, how they will use the group as material.
Fans of Palahniuk will again find his simple sentences and structures upside down, funneling themselves into tail-end contextual points meant to shock and disturb. Narration is as expected: Palahniuk's injected ideas about mankind, the personification of in inanimate objects and the objectification of humans. Though one criticism is unavoidable: Palahniuk’s writers are indiscernible among themselves. They all come out sounding like Chuck.
Guts
One piece that stands out among the disturbing is Guts, written by Palahniuk’s fictional bus driver, Saint Gut-Free. Originally published in Playboy, March 2004, Guts is has acquired a cult following as fashionable as its author. It had, at the time of its printing in Haunted, been the motivator seventy-three people needed to pass out cold during live readings. Palahniuk writes in The “Guts” Effect, Haunted’s afterword, that “No one fainted the first time I read the short story "'Guts.'" He was in his writers’ workshop at the time. However, its first public reading at a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, put two people on the floor. It has since introduced many more live patrons to bookstore planks, carpets and rugs.
Haunted (ISBN-10: 1-4000-3282-2, ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-3282-2)
Haunted
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