Haunted: A Novel

Not at all what I was hoping for and yet still somehow exactly what I expected. Haunted is nothing more than a number of gruesome, shocking, and disturbing stories strung together by one main disturbing story that never gets interesting. The first story is "Guts" which is so unsettling and yet intriguing that it can easily mislead you into thinking you'll find another 20 or so stories like it in the book. But that's far from the case. Not a single one of the stories in Haunted beyond "Guts" was worthwhile. They were ALL written for one reason and one reason only: to shock. Some of them accomplish this while others just make you want to roll your eyes at the sometimes seemingly childish, sick imagination of the author. I can certainly see why Palahniuk's novels are so popular with males who generally don't read much to begin with. It's all shock for the sake of shock with a feeble attempt at a meaningful message at the end. But there's really no message beyond castration, murder, and eating the fleshy ass cheeks of a dead woman.
And one would think that a book entitled Haunted would be at least somewhat scary. It's not. There's one story in the entire book that I would even consider somewhat creepy and it's called the Nightmare Box. Thing is, it doesn't really fit in with the other stories and it isn't really all that good to begin with. Of course, none of these stories really fit together. The book goes from a story about a horny teenager who loses most of his digestive system in a kinky pool incident, to a woman who gives out deadly foot massages, to a 13-year-old boy with progeria who appears to be an 80-year-old man and emotionally blackmails naive women into having sex with him, to a random story about a world in which everyone wants to commit suicide so that they might all live in eternal peace on the planet Venus. Yeah some of those sound interesting but none of them actually are. It's all just a bunch of random fluff thrown together so that Mr. Palahniuk would have enough material to call it a novel, even though it's really more like a collection of short stories. All that probably kept it from being published as such was the main story that comes in between the outrageous, yet dull short stories. The main story is about a group of murderous, greedy morons who all go on a writer's retreat for a 3 month period and start sabotaging one another. You hate every single character, even though it's hard to tell them apart anyway beyond their physical deformities which are described ad-nauseam. The main story goes nowhere and turns out to be worse than the short stories. I never thought that such a shocking book could be so boring but Haunted definitely is.

Freaky, weird, nasty, sadistic; all these seemingly negative adjectives describe this story, yet it somehow remained quite the refreshing read.

Really great read, but you need to have the stomach for it. I also suggest taking your time with this one. It's hard to digest. I had to take a few weeks break somewhere in the middle.

Chuck delivers the kind of book you would expect: a narrative that explores the darker side of man. And he does it in a style that is both revolting and intriguing.

Brilliant collection of truly disturbing short stories. It's like a modern "Decameron" as written by the characters of "Masque of the Red Death" (if they all had ambitions of being published). Loved it.

i didn't actually finish this book. it was pretentious and annoying. it felt like the quthor was playing a big, unfunny joke on me. i got about half way through and quit. i couldn't imagine the story going anywhere i wanted to be.

While clever in its scope, I was not able to finish this book. The plot would almost be genius if it wasn't for the superfluous gore. This was the first Palahniuk novel I attempted to read, so I can only hope that the next I try will be a little less grotesque.

I honestly think I could have done better... Without a foundation of what might be predictable and expected it's harder to suspend disbelief, for every whack job there needs to be a few normal people reacting as most of us would- otherwise you stop sympathizing entirely with the characters. It feels more like a contrived exercise in pulp fiction writing. The author leaves you with something too self indulgent to really appreciate. He just needed to spend another 3 months adding more realism to it..

The setting is very different for your average Palahniuk, but still, it hooked me from the very first pages. The characters and diverse narratives however were 100% Palahniuk. Not his best, but at the same time, not his worst.

Palahniuk is a transgressional fiction writer, and Haunted is an extreme example of this. Novel is very graphic, however his descriptions are not worse in this book than they are in his other ones. The difference is marely the frequency at which such graphic violence / self harm / accidents / gore are being told.

Much like other Palahniuk's work, I enjoyed reading this book. Brilliantly done, and as usual full of satire, gore and and an excellent personifications of popular culture.