Now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading Haunted, the latest book by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, I think I’m joining the consensus: This would have worked much better as a straightforward collection of short stories than it does as a novel with short stories told/written by the characters therein.
For starters, each of these different individuals speaks in almost the exact same voice. (Palahniuk gives a couple of them the Chuck Palahniuk equivalent of down-home American accents, but you almost can’t tell.) Next, and I’m going to try to be spoiler-free about this, but the notion that this is the collection of people such a “writers’ retreat” would assemble…I’m sorry, but there’s only so much disbelief I can suspend. Moreover, and again trying to be spoiler free, 90% of them really don’t need to suffer through this sort of event to make them famous–they could almost all become (in)famous through their own life stories, and at least two that I can think of should already be famous anyway. That’s to say nothing of the masochistic behavior in which the group indulges en masse, which would be tough enough to swallow (no pun intended) even if the bulk of the book weren’t dedicated to chronicling the very different lives and neuroses of the characters involved. There also are some weird problems with structural asymmetry, in that almost but not quite all of the characters on the retreat have done a certain thing (something very specific, but again, trying to be spoiler-free), and in that almost but not quite all of the stories they write/tell (it’s never made completely clear, though by the end the context clues and the occasional reference to the framing story would indicate the latter) are autobiographical. It’s in those asymmetries that Haunted really betrays its origins as a short-story collection; or if that’s not really the case, it’s in those asymmetries that it at least shows why it would work better that way.
That being said, I really think the short stories are almost all top-drawer. The foot-massage one was hilarious–it read like a perfect parody of Palahniuk’s trademark “literature of obscure expertise,” you know? Taken in tandem with the “Chef Assassin” story, it’s proof that for all Palahniuk may vocally rage against his critics, he is one himself. But genre fans who don’t belong to either the Cult or to the Cult-haters will find much to appreciate here too. There’s a great Bigfoot horror story (!), a great rural urban-legend horror story, one of the most unique serial-killer horror stories I’ve ever read, a great masturbation horror story, a couple of traditional “Jesus Christ these people are sad and messed-up” Chuck P. stories…excellent work, and really excellent horror. In fact, I daresay that in the latter regard, Haunted is more effective than Palahniuk’s previous two stabs at the genre, Lullaby and Diary. Hell, I think that if you took the overarching conceit about the writers’ retreat, scrapped the notion that the people on the retreat are the people telling the other stories, and condensed IT into its OWN short story, you’d have maybe the best book Palahniuk ever wrote–better even, perhaps, than the masterful and moving Choke. Instead you’ve got what you’ve got: a flawed though compelling, or compelling though flawed, work overall.