‘People fall so in love with their pain…’
Chuck Palahniuk is an author who has mostly passed me by. He does hold the rare accolade of one of his books being adapted into a film that turned out to be far superior to his original source material (Fight Club), and indeed, that was the only Palahniuk book I had read until Haunted. Unless you count his 2009 epistolary novel Pygmy which I gave up on around 10 pages in. And I don’t count it. So nor should you, dear reader, nor should you. So, why Haunted? Well, the choice was prompted by this AV Club article in which various contributors pick the scariest book they have ever read. Intriguing…
Haunted is a mishmash of 23 short stories and various free form poems, using the framing device of a number of burgeoning writers with silly names like Lady Baglady and Reverend Godless attending a writer’s retreat only to realise that the intensifying depravity of the retreat itself is the real story. What follows is a series of gruesome and grotesque short stories that take in everything from sexual deviance, disease and existentialism. Perhaps the most famous of these stories is Guts, an ode to masturbation so odious that it resulted in the sacking of a teacher who read it to his class and is reportedly also responsible for numerous injuries during Palahniuk’s book readings due to audience members fainting at the stories (ahem) climax.
Is Haunted actually frightening though? Not really. It feels more like torture porn than something that would actually get under one’s skin, but having said that, there were moments that genuinely made me squirm, a rare talent shared by Irvine Welsh and Iain Banks, but not something that I would really want to explore again.
In the end, I laboured through some parts of Haunted, but found other sections genuinely exhilarating, which I guess is par for the course for a collection of short stories. While it is unique and it certainly provokes a strong response, I don’t think it has made me anymore of a Palahniuk fan.