| Book Review | Dana Place |
"Haunted" By Chuck Palahniuk
In his most recent novel, "Haunted", sixteen characters
answer an ad to "just disappear"; to leave their jobs,
families, and everything in the world that has been holding
them back from that masterpiece they were meant to write,
for three months. After realizing that this wasn't going to
happen for any of them, they decide to become their own
story, to plot to become the victims of their own situation,
locked in an old theater with a madman torturing them for
his own amusement. They were going to manufacture their own
masterpiece of horror, where they are the victims, simply
waiting for the world to find them.
I am a fan of most of the books I have read by Chuck Palahniuk. No matter how defeatist, how gruesome, or just plain overwhelmingly negative the situations his characters are in, you can always find some kind of humanity in each of his characters. You can always feel for his characters, even if their decisions and motives are not always the most altruistic. This is not the case in his most recent novel. Each chapter is interrupted by a short poem about one of the characters and then a story told by that character. This stops the flow of the novel after each chapter and you end up reading the next chapter just to get to the next short story. Because of the breaks in the flow, you really don't get a chance to care or even feel for any of the characters, and everything they go through in the novel doesn't really seem to matter. The short stories on the other hand, which ranged from the ludicrously grotesque to the incredibly heart-wrenching, were by far the best part of the book.
Other novelists have written intertwining short stories without the need to tie them together with a novel (Stephen King, Larry Niven, Isaac Azimov, Ray Bradbury, and Clive Barker to name a few), and now I see why. It is almost like reading two separate novels and trying to follow the continuity from each at the same time. I would suggest picking the book up just to read the short stories (they are actually listed in a bibliography at the end for easy reference), but the way the book is written, you lose any connection with the characters and their tribulations. And if you are interested afterward, read the actual chapters of the novel. Maybe you will have better luck enjoying it than I did.