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Haunted cover art

Haunted

By: Chuck Palahniuk
Narrated by: Scott Brick, Marc Cashman, Erik Davies, Kimberly Farr
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Summary

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 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.

Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television: The Real World meets Alive. 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, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest, which means his most extreme and his most provocative.

©2005 Chuck Palahniuk (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[The stories] consistently, powerfully transcend their macabre premises to showcase the heart beating beneath the horrors." ( Publishers Weekly)
"Written with the incisive brutality that accounts for Mr. Palahniuk's intense popularity." ( The New York Times)

What listeners say about Haunted

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Needed a good edit!

This is one I first picked up years ago but only got about 40 or so pages in before losing interest and, to be honest, it was a bit of a struggle to get through it again.

The concept was exciting - Chuck writing a portmanteau horror-ish book, a group of writers gathered together to create their masterworks all slowly going mad - but too often I found myself getting annoyed by it. With that said, several of the short stories were excellent (in particular I loved Mother Nature's story about the dark side of alternative therapies and the one about the life-saver doll) but the main problem was with the parts which joined the stories together.

There were too many characters and I was kept distanced from caring about any of them because of their monikers. I'm well used to the Chuck-isms of strange character habits but this is often in opposition to the 'normal' world - in Haunted there is nothing BUT Chuck-isms and it was just too much. It felt at times like Tom Morello's guitar playing, you appreciated the creativity but every now and again just want to shout at him to do a normal guitar solo!

This was the Palahiuk book I felt needed an editor to be whacking him across the head and telling him to cut 1/3 of it out, to cut half of the characters out, and to tone down the Chuck-isms. There was so much potential there for a cracking book but I think it just went too far and lost touch with what Chuck is often good at and that is using strangeness to highlight things which affect all of us.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Love it or hate it, it's up to you!

It's difficult. Either Chuck Palahnuik is the only writer out there who tells it like it is.. like it REALLY is; or he is a new breed of ubershock scribe with the uncanny ability to transform spite and bitterness into an art form.
Town square preacher, or puke-splattered crazy in a bar? I guess it boils down to what you look for in a book. It's certainly not his best. The concept is original, and you will want to read it through. It's exciting and imaginative. It's way out there. Way out there! But it doesn't have the intense thermo-nuclear pulse of, say, FightClub.
Best way to sum it up is this. If Jane Austin occupies your bedside locker... probably best to skip it; if you like your whiskey raw, what the hell... go for it!

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Not as clever as it should be

I felt I needed a shower after this book. It's a deeply black comedy, very nasty in places. It's a satire on how people manipulate the media , and how the media manipulates people to justtify their respective existences. It just went on too long, and I felt it revelled in its crudeness, stretching the joke too far. Probably would have appealed to me more if I had read it as an adolescent.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Creepy but...

I much preferred reading the book. Was much more hard-hitting than in the audible version in my opinion.

The first sections are really tough. Not for the faint-hearted and I suspect an acquired taste!

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Satire at its most brutal

This definitely is not an easy book but it is worth reading if you like strong horror and satire.

It has a compelling structure and premise, that function well to deliver a lot of grisly, absurd and deeply tragic narratives with a bite, presumably commenting on fame and those most hungry for it.

Not one for the faint of heart though. You have been warned.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Painful

Painful, painful, painful - It just didn't work for me. Some gruesome descriptions but there's an underlying theme that I for one just didn't get. I was bored and willed for the end to come -

"Life's too short for bad books....."

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

very weird

Not so much horrific as just too far fetched and a bit difficult to be intrested enough to put in the effort of following the story. Some of the storys within the story are quite good but in my opinion not really worth using a credit on, there are better books out there and some of them are by this author.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent work

Apocalyptic, rough, revealing the darkest edges of human nature. I think I'll listen to it second time to grasp more detail.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Yikes

This is my first book by this author, maybe he’s an acquired taste. That said, I felt this book had a lot of potential but failed on the delivery. One of my random questions: the guy recording everything, why would he record themselves all hacking their own toes off if they wanted to pin it on someone else? That just doesn’t make sense. Assuming they get saved and he shares the last thing he filmed as proof of their hardships—he would just expose them all. Maybe I’ve missed the point on that particular character, maybe I’ve missed the joke or satire or whatever.
Anyways, I think I would have enjoyed this more if it focused more on the situation they were in and if the stories from their past were shorter. Some of them were semi entertaining but ultimately they just felt like a waste of time and didn’t make me care about the characters. The doll one has left me feeling like I’m going to puke since I heard it ( specifically when describing the Betty and the smell part) it wasn’t dark or edgy just super f*cking gross. You can have gross things in stories, totally fine, but this just goes on and on about it.
Narration was fine, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say unless you’re a fan of the author I don’t think you’ll enjoy this book. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
I don’t like returning titles but I feel like I’ve lost a chunk of my life reading this and did t enjoy it one bit, so, sorry, but that’s what I’m going to do.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Read before enjoyed it in the ear

Not the easiest of listens/reads. Chuck has an amazing way with words and an outstanding array of ideas seen sideways.

Not for those with weak stomachs.

Read very well with an ensemble cast.

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