Still, the scariest thing about the stories is the same thing that's always scary in a Palahniuk book the hints of evil lurking underneath a seemingly placid reality. In several of them, children go missing for horrific reasons. In another, a reporter down on his luck frames and kills a former child star to win a Pulitzer. In one, a resuscitation dummy is put to not necessarily educational use by a police department. (Never mind that all the stories sound like they're written by Chuck Palahniuk.) These get more brutal as the situation becomes increasingly dire. Interspersed with the narrative about what's going on at the retreat are short stories, each supposedly written by one of the characters. Meanwhile, they're all sort of doing what they came for: telling stories. Sure, they want to be rescued but not until things get bad enough to make a really great story.
#Haunted chuck palahniuk audiobook movie#
This not only fails to get her out but also inspires the rest of the retreat-goers to hack off bits of themselves in an ever more obsessive race to become the star of the inevitable movie of their lives.
In an effort to force the directors to let her out, one character hacks off her ear with a knife. Rebellious would-be authors sabotage the food supply, then the furnace. Someone breaks the glass in a window and finds impenetrable concrete behind it. No one is allowed to leave the old theater where the retreat is being held. Things begin to go wrong almost immediately. But the retreat turns out to be not quite as advertised. It's every aspiring author's dream: escape your real life for a while, and there's nothing to stop you from creating a masterpiece. They all saw the same ad for a three-month writer's retreat. The characters are named after their personalities: Miss Sneezy, Agent Tattletale, Miss America, Comrade Snarky. Haunted is less a collection of horror stories than a warped satire, a combination of Survivor, Fear Factor and that Exquisite Corpse game where each person contributes a paragraph to the same story. The story in question, Guts, is such an over-the-top grossout spectacular that it ends up being more funny than disturbing. There's no in-between, especially not when the main thing people are saying about this collection is that one of the stories makes audiences at author readings pass out, weep and vomit. The buzz about Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of linked short stories, Haunted, is the type that will either scare you off immediately or have you scratching at bookshop doors to get in the minute the book comes out.
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