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After powering through Palahniuk's Haunted, I figured I would churn out a brief tributary review. Isn't it funny that when we're kids, a book report seems like the most senseless and horrible punishment of all time - we have to READ?? and WRITE ABOUT READING? - and here I am voluntarily doing that exact same thing? Oh, how the years heaped upon our shoulders twist and fillet our minds...

Haunted is the story of several dozen aspiring writers who voluntarily isolate themselves from the world for three months to complete their respective masterpieces. Each character is quirky and crooked, known only by monickers which describe them: "Miss Sneezy", "The Missing Link" and "The Earl of Slander" are but a few. When the writers arrive at an abandoned theatre complex and realize that they are imprisoned there, a collective agreement to turn their experience into a horrific ordeal worthy of film rights and talk-show circuitry pulls the party into a spiral of debauchery and self-mutilation.

Each chapter reveals more of their depravity, punctuated by a brief poem about the chapter's key character and a short story they have written that illustrates their past.

The short stories are, for the most part, fabulous and disgusting. "Guts" is the most memorable, painting a tale of a chronic masturbator's mad search for a better way to get off. I found myself squirming as Pahalniuk (gleefully?) forced me to contend with the gory details of a boy drowning in a pool, his intestines roiling out his ass and ensnared in filter suction, comforted only by the floating globules of his own semen. Watching a movie, you can look away - it's over soon. In a book, it's not quite that simple. It's horrific but you're doing it to yourself - reading Haunted is much like the echoed instances of self-abasement that its characters become so obsessed with.

Most of the short stories are similarly dark and forboding: a teenager with a hyper-aging disease, tricking suburbanite volunteers at an old-age home into fucking him and later blackmailing them with statutory rape charges; a tick-tocking Nightmare Box which renders catatonic anyone willing to peek inside and see Proof that this world is an illusion. Every single story is intriguing and wonderful in its own particular, sordid way but as the book progressed, I often found myself noticing missing connections, unfinished business. The cast of characters is large - perhaps too large - and the link between each protagonist's actions in the theatre and their stories of the past are tenuous and often superficial. It feels forced, somehow - Pahalniuk clearly wrote many of the short stories first and then attempted to build an overarching narrative around them. It shows.

As the backstories are slowly revealed and the situation in the theatre become increasingly desperate (sabotage, murder, cat-eating, cannibalism, dead baby devouring and soforth), the whole book becomes too fantastical to take seriously. The short stories work well because they slide along the edges of reality: bizarre but believable, frightening because they could be. In contrast, the demented antics of the theatre survival-horror narrative seem ludicrous, too utterly fucked to be relateable to any kind of reality the reader might know.

We're supposed to believe these people have transcended human-like reactions to death and pain and abominations, just because they have aspirations of fame? We're supposed to gather some kind of insight into humanity as we read about giddy, trite conversation around a corpse while remaining survivors eat the roasted flesh from a woman's buttock? I can't do it. I won't. I became shell-shocked: indifferent of every death, glossing over each new depravity. At some point, I realized that Pahaliuk was clearly shooting for shock value, hysterical with glee over how far he could push the boundaries. And the book suffers as a result.

The inter-chapter poems are mediocre at best, relying on repetitive phrasing to build connections between each character's motivation (which is, predicably, to forge themselves into a worthy story) and hammer home the book's prevailing point which is that conflict and strife will always have a home with humanity: we forever create and fear our own Devil. It's a worthy point to make, but I raced through each poem simply because I knew it preceded another glorious tragedy.

After the last chapter there is a page listing for each short story, so you can go back and re-read the ones you liked. I smiled when I turned the final page and saw this, because it reinforces what I've concluded: that the book is simply a loosely fit container for these tales, a finnicky attempt to bond them together. The short stories are the focus, the dark meat, the midnight spice. Everything else is just filler.

Haunted is very worthwhile but a book, it is not. Not really. Not wholly. A compilation of solid, twisted, blackened tales, it is. And on this level, it succeeds spectacularly.

Posted by Chris at 01:01 PM >> Commentations (2)