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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Palahniuk C. 2005 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Hauntedby 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. Hauntedis on one level a satire of reality television--The Real WorldmeetsAlive. 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,Hauntedis Chuck Palahniuk at his finest--which means his most extreme and his most provocative.
Author Notes
Chuck Palahniuk was born in Pasco, Washington on February 21, 1962. He received a BA in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1986. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked as a journalist and as a diesel mechanic. He has written numerous novels including Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant, Snuff, Pygmy, Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You, and Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread. Fight Club was made into a film by director David Fincher and Choke was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees, a nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
One of Palahniuk's more sweeping and macabre offerings, this is a collection of 23 short stories and poems generated at a fictional writer's retreat turned grotesque survival camp. The pieces range from the stomach-turning to the satirical or the absurd. The seven readers tackling the decidedly offbeat Palahniuk are, for the most part, refreshingly successful. Cashman is a standout, narrating the action at the retreat. His voice shuttles nimbly between the male and female writers, while maintaining the integrity of his own unnamed character. Morey's narration is disappointing on "Guts," the novel's most notorious and gruesome tale, which has reportedly caused some listeners to faint. Morey sounds too mature and polished for this series of wicked adolescent masturbatory nightmares. In general, the multivoiced narration is practiced and professional, with the trio of actresses turning in particularly strong performances. The other side of all that spit and polish is that Palahniuk's humor is occasionally stifled. Some listeners may wonder whether the author's prose is so singular that only he might be capable of delivering it. But overall, an engaging, albeit lengthy, listen. Simultaneous release with Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 21). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A writers' retreat turns out to be more hellish than its participants would have imagined. The willing participants all answered an ad for a three-month retreat that would allow them to cut off all contact with the outside world (they all leave in a bus before dawn, telling no one), only to find themselves locked in an old theater with no way out and a limited supply of food. Their sort-of host for the retreat, Mr. Whittier, wants them to use their isolation to create some sort of masterpiece, invoking the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron, Shelley, among others, produced their classics of gothic horror. It's quickly obvious, however, that we're far from the land of Shelley with this band of losers, who seem more interested in heightening their own suffering in order to have a better sell for the movie or memoir rights they will assuredly be offered once rescued. Palahniuk (Diary, 2003, etc.) ensures that we have little sympathy for the characters--known for the most part by the sarcastic noms de plume they give each other, like Comrade Snarky, Miss Sneezy and Chef Assassin--by showing how they continually sabotage themselves. The characters' back-stories, which make up the bulk of the novel, also show them to be a uniformly selfish, grubby and, more often than not, murderous lot, so when the bloodletting starts, few tears will be shed. As usual, Palahniuk drops us right into a nasty, vile core of base desire where all good deeds are punished and nobody escapes unscathed (let's just say that cannibalism pops up about a third of the way in, and things get worse from there on). And while a number of the stories here are ingenious, in a devilish sort of way, the constant barrage of wicked sadism soon palls. Stomach-churning horror that takes a bit too much joy in its diabolic machinations. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this over-the-top gore fest from Palahniuk ( Fight Club, 0 1996 ; Lullaby, 0 2002), a group of aspiring writers move into a locked, windowless theater to write their masterpieces under the guidance of a (seemingly) old man. The story of their hellacious retreat-kidnapping is interspersed with poems about the various writers and stories by them. Convinced that they will one day sell the story of their dystopian nightmare for millions, the writers seek out suffering to make their lives saleable: they starve themselves, lop off body parts, cannibalize, and so on. The stories here vaguely resemble ghost stories, but rather than being scary, they're just disgusting. Sex dolls shaped like children, a fetus aborted by Marilyn Monroe, a pool intake sucking out a man's colon--you get the picture. There's a point to the madness--Palahniuk is exploring our yearning for suffering and our newfound desire to make our misery marketable. The allegory is sometimes very clever and pitch-black funny. But Haunted 0 provokes a lot more nausea and eye rolls than deep thoughts. One hesitates to criticize a novel featuring a chef who murders people who review his dishes poorly, but we'll take our chances; this novel will please Palahniuk's hardcore fans and few others. But he certainly has his many and devoted fans. --John Green Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Never answer an ad that says, "Artists' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months." Palahniuk's 23 characters did, and now they're hungry, isolated, and telling more and more desperate stories. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.