Books: Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

I have six books sitting next to me that I haven’t blogged about yet, so it’s time for a marathon blog session to clear out the queue. The book I most recently finished was Haunted by Chuck Palahnuik. Chuck is one of my favorite authors. I have read all of his stuff but I had been putting off reading this one for some time. Mostly because I hadn’t heard great things about it.

Haunted is a novel that includes a mix of poems and short stories about each of the characters in the novel. My theory is that Chuck planned on doing a book of short stories, but someone talked him into trying to write a novel around it. I am sure the publisher was getting tired of his non-novel books like Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories and Fugitives and Refugees which usually don’t achieve the commercial success a proper novel does.

The short stories are classic Palahnuik, they are strange, off-beat, filled with odd facts and events, and remind me of much of his earlier work. There is even one short story that I blogged about years ago because the story was that people were fainting while he read it on the book tour.The poems are decent, but nothing special. The novel itself is OK, but hardly up to the Palahnuik’s normal work.

The novel section is about a group of people who go to a writer’s retreat that takes a turn for the worse, the problems are agitated by the fact that everyone sees this as their passage to pop culture stardom. They start to make the situation worse on purpose to make their story more sensational, meaning better book deals, talk shows, and movies. While it is obviously a statement on “reality TV” culture, it just doesn’t have the same qualities as most Palahnuik stories. The characters are definitely strange, but you don’t relate to them the way you do with his other characters. The writing style even seems different, many of his other stories are incredible strange but always sound like they could be true. This story doesn’t feel real at all. So if you are a Palahniuk fan I would read the book, but don’t expect much from the novel or poems and just enjoy the short stories.

P.S. If you are wondering his name is pronounced Paula-Nick. (he wrote about how his parents taught him to pronounce it using his grandparents names)

-James