Apostrophe S

I had a complete collection of Chuck Palahniuk’s (I can spell that without looking now) books, from Invisible Monsters right up to Lullaby and now Haunted. They are the most borrowed books I’ve ever owned, and now the only one that’s actually here on my bookshelf is Haunted. And that’s pretty sad, considering Haunted is probably my least favorite of Chuck’s books. Not that it’s bad. It’s probably a 6.5 out of 10, it’s just that his previous books all topped 7 at least.

Here’s the premise: A group of people sign up for a “writer’s retreat,” which turns out to be a crazy old (?) man who locks them in an abandoned theater with lots of strangely decorated rooms. Things quickly deteriorate. The old man won’t hand over the key to get out until people start writing. So the “captives” quickly get the idea that they will take their tale of being trapped all the way to the bank. Except they need to beef it up. People need to start dying. Cruel things need to be done to them. Like losing fingers and toes. The food is destroyed. Pretty soon, they’re coming up with lots of horrible ways they can make themselves be victims, in order to make the story more bankable.

Along the way, the actually do write stories, which divide the chapters describing what’s actually going on at the “retreat.” Which turn out to be the real gems of the book. The short stories are pure Palahniuk. Stuff he probably couldn’t turn into full books, so he just summed them up into dozen-page stories. Like a kid whose lower digestive tract gets sucked out by the intake valve in a swimming pool. Or how Big Foots are really the same as werewolves. Or how there’s an island in Pugent Sound where all the people who are the opposite of Bubble boys live. Or a woman who finds the aborted fetus of Marilyn Monroe at an antiques shop. You get the idea.

The overarching story of the captives in the theater seems to stumble and end unsatisfactorily, and really doesn’t make much sense to begin with. And the stories all read like Chuck Palahniuk stories, not like stories written by a dozen characters with names like Chef Assassin and Saint Gut-Free. It sort of reminded me of the cast of “Lost,” because there were no normal characters. Everyone was some kind of freak with a freak background story.

I won’t say I didn’t like the book, but I will say I found the short stories to be much more interesting than the framework they were hanging on. Why didn’t Palahniuk just publish a book of collected short fiction? That would have been perhaps more satisfying.

And hey, if I’ve loaned you a Chuck Palahniuk book, remind me to get it back from you. Especially you, Corey.

Next book, The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert.

[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]