This is the second novel by Palahniuk that I have read. I read Choke a few years ago and thought it was quite shocking. Haunted is equally so and maybe a little more so. It is really a collection of stories included within the framework of a novel telling of a group of people who are locked in an old abandoned theater for 3 months on the pretense of a writing seminar. As the novel progresses, each character tells a story and the conditions of the storytellers decline. They run out of food, the plumbing goes bad, and they resort to extremes ... all of them thinking that when they get rescued, their story will make a great news or TV story. The stories they tell along the way are the meat of the novel and many of them are quite good and quite horrific. Some reminded me of Ray Bradbury or Rod Serling in a Twilight Zone kind of way. Others were definitely meant to shock including the first story Guts which supposedly made people faint when read aloud by the author. There was also a lot of humor in some of the stories. My favorites were probably Slumming about rich people dressing up as the homeless for kicks; The Nightmare Box a Bradburyesque story about what happens when someone looks into an antique box at the right moment; Crippled a Hitchcockian story about living on disability benefits; and Guts detailing the potential dangers of masturbation. Some of the other stories didn't work real well for me and the overall premise of the novel was a little over the top.
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