Another clue lies in the frequent references to the Villa Diodati, that house on the banks of Lake Geneva where Lord Byron, John Polidori and the Shelleys hid away while they dreamed and wrote of monstrous events. There's a clue in the epigraph, which is a quote from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", the story of hellish souls locked away in a castle to carouse while the plague rages outside. Just as the reader starts to sense satire, a possible familiarity with the ambience, Palahniuk undermines it. The stereotyping of the characters is observed with telling accuracy, because in the real world of writers' seminars all the participants of these notably claustrophobic encounters, including the tutors, do quickly adopt roles that are caricatures of their normal personalities: the killer critic, the ingenue, the performance artiste, the unrelenting cynic, and so on. While the author never once seems to be holding back information, the suspense is constant.Īnyone who has been to or taught at a writers' workshop will feel at first that they are on recognisable, if extreme, territory. You become dependent on them for information about what's going on, and so are drawn further into their guilty doings. The reader has to grope around in the cold darkness, finding out who these people are and what is happening to them at more or less the same time as they themselves find out. Palahniuk is not a writer who makes his intentions or meaning clear, which in this case is a great strength. Some of the stories appear to be fiction as it might have been written by the character, others are artless accounts of their lives. The doors close, the building is dark and unwelcoming, the retreat begins.Īs the cold takes its grip, as food and fresh water run out and the toilets become unusable, as the characters begin to harm each other and damage the building, one by one they come forward to tell their stories. The bus deposits everyone at an empty building, an abandoned theatre. It turns out they know as little as anyone else about what is to happen, but they have at least been entrusted with a few practical arrangements. All are grotesques, all are writers (not usually the same thing), and all have responded to an advertisement offering three months of seclusion in a writers' retreat: "Abandon Your Life for Three Months".Īlready on the bus are three people who seem to know what's going on: a prematurely elderly disabled teenager in a wheelchair, a buxom Mrs Clark, and the driver, Saint Gut-Free. Almost none of them is named, but they are stereotyped with a label: Miss America, Comrade Snarky, Agent Tattletale, Duke of Vandals, Chef Assassin, and so on. The narrator becomes an accomplice to them, but because of the first-person voice, so too does the reader.Ī bus tours the empty pre-dawn streets of an unnamed city, halting to pick up one passenger after another. The style is the book, and it is a substantial constituent of the appalling events that are described throughout the novel. This innovative approach is not a gimmick. The narrator does not exist as a character as such in the story: the novel is written jointly by everyone in it, and yet as a result of some sleight of hand I could not discern, it is also by none of them. The narrative voice, written in Palahniuk's distinctively flat and declarative language, is a collective one. It is written with such deftness that it takes many pages before the reader realises what's going on. The book is told in the first person plural, but unobtrusively. The formal shape of the narrative is just as unusual.
At least one of the stories can be seen as a stand-alone work (more on this later), but none the less this is a unitary novel of exceptional originality. Although superficially it might appear to be a fix-up (a collection of individual stories welded together in an attempt to make them seem like a novel), in fact the stories in this case are the novel.
These are linked by short pieces of narrative.
Haunted takes the form of 23 short stories, each introduced by a poem identifying the purported writer of the story that then follows. This most recent novel is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (404pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99)Īfter earlier novels such as Fight Club and Diary, it doesn't seem likely that anyone would pick up a book by Chuck Palahniuk incautiously, but even so the incautious should be warned.
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