Other stories are simply ironic or funny.
Let's see, someone masturbates with a pool jet and gets his organs sucked out, a woman passes out and they eat her ass because they think she's dead but then she wakes up and takes a bite before bleeding to death, a man cuts off his penis with a cleaver and another man goes to eat it but he chokes on it and uld you TRY HARDER for shock value?! That being said, there are some less gruesome, more gut-wrenching stories, specifically the story of Mrs Clark and her daughter Cassandra. " I feel like the premise of this book was BE AS SHOCKING AS POSSIBLE! I mean, the book comes with an 'epilogue' that basically brags about how many people have passed out during public readings. Thinking back on it, I can hardly remember the plot, but I remember really not enjoying it. " This was perhaps Palahniuk's worst novel for me. I'm impressed with how Palahniuk tied multiple short stories into his entire novel and made it cohesive. All it accomplished was a scattered story with unnecessary asides. It attempted to be intellectual in its presentation of the characters and store line with random mini stories intermixed. Overall Performance: Narration Rating: Story Rating:.Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest-which means his most extreme and his most provocative. 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. Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television- The Real World meets Alive. 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. 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.
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. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter-sometimes all at once. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise.