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Haunted

A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

ISBN: 0385509480
ISBN-13: 9780385509480
Format: Hardcover

Summary

Cult favorite Chuck Palahniuk outgrosses even himself in this series of grotesque tales about a group of writers at a three-month writing retreat at an old theater. In a scheme to become rich and famous when they later write about their ordeal, they embark on an experience of extreme communal brutality-eventually even consuming parts of each other's bodies. Amid all the horror, the stories they write at the retreat are scattered through the book: set in the actual world, they show another side of Palahniuk, one with considerably less gore and a less extreme focus on the macabre.

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Media Reviews

"Mr. Palahniuk can be eerily precise and knowledgeable about, say, exactly what happens to someone who swallows water at a temperature of 205 degrees Fahrenheit. He knows about nail fungus. Anyone wishing to know exactly how flies lay eggs on a corpse need look no further than this set of nightmare-laden bedtime stories."    -- Janet Maslin

   -- New York Times

"If you like brutally funny satire, cannibalism, self-mutilation, and murder (and who doesn't) or are a former member of the Manson family looking for something to read aloud to your friends and loved ones, then HAUNTED will be an indispensable collection and holiday-season classic."    -- Anthony Bourdain

"[T]he most original work of fiction this year."    -- Jonathan Cape

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
Published date: 2005
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6 x 8.75 inches
Weight: 1.3 pounds
Pages: 404

Publisher's Notes

HAUNTED is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Artists' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months" and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But "here" turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.

HAUNTED is at one level a satire of reality television—The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition—The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein—to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, HAUNTED is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest—which means his most extreme and his most provocative.

Other Editions

Paperback Reprint - Random House Inc (2006) - from $6.99
Hardcover - Bantam Dell Pub Group (2005) - from $9.95

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Haunted : A Novel of Stories

Chuck Palahniuk

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Haunted: A Novel of Stories

Palahniuk, Chuck

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