Haunted (Palahniuk novel)
| Haunted | |
|---|---|
 First edition cover | |
| Author | Chuck Palahniuk |
| Cover artist |
Rodrigo Corral Jeff Middleton |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Horror, satire, dark comedy |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | May 3, 2005 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 416 |
| ISBN | 0-385-50948-0 |
| OCLC | 56686360 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 22 |
| LC Class | PS3566.A4554 H38 2005 |
| Preceded by | Diary |
| Followed by | Rant |
Haunted is a 2005 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is a frame story for a series of 23 short stories, most preceded by a free verse poem. Each story is followed by a chapter of the main narrative, is told by a character in main narrative, and ties back into the main story in some way. Typical of Palahniuk's work, the dominant motifs in Haunted are sexual deviance, sexual identity, homosexuality, desperation, social distastefulness, disease, murder, death, and existentialism.
The synopsis on the dustjacket describes Haunted as a satire of reality television, but according to Palahniuk, the novel is actually about "the battle for credibility" that has resulted from the ease with which one can publish through the use of modern technology.
The cover of the 2006 U.S. trade paperback reprint features a glow-in-the-dark image.
Plot summary
Each of the book's chapters contains three sections: a story chapter, which acts as a framing device for the otherwise unconnected short stories; a poem about a particular writer on the tour, its author being unspecified; and the short story written by that writer.
The main story centers on a group of seventeen individuals (all of whom go by nicknames based on the story they tell) who have decided to participate in a secret writers' retreat, frequently compared by characters to the Villa Diodati retreat of 1816. After having noticed an invitation to the retreat posted on the bulletin board of a cafe in Oregon, the characters follow instructions on the invitation to meet Mr. Whittier, the retreat's organizer. Whittier tells them to each wait for a bus to pick them up the next morning and bring only what they can fit into one piece of luggage (in particular, only what they feel they need most).
The next day, the seventeen characters, Whittier, and his assistant Mrs. Clark are driven to an abandoned theatre. Whittier locks all of them inside the theatre, telling them they have three months to each write a magnum opus before he will allow them to leave. In the meantime, they will have enough food and water to survive, as well as heat, electricity, bedrooms, bathrooms, and a clothes washing and drying machine provided.
The characters live under harmless conditions at first. However, the group (not including Whittier or Clark) eventually decide that they could make a better story of their own suffering inside the theatre, and thereby become rich after the public discovers their fate. They then begin to individually sabotage the food and utilities provided to them, with each character trying to only destroy one food or utility to slightly increase the drama of their stay. Since the characters are not co-ordinating their plans, they end up destroying all their food and utilities, forcing all of them to struggle to survive starvation, cold, and darkness.
With Whittier accidentally dying from a stomach rupture, the writers find themselves trapped without him. Believing a great increase in their suffering will provide a better story for when they're rescued, several writers start to willingly engage in self-mutilation and cannibalism, doing so to give the pretense Whittier tortured them. With numerous characters committing suicide, killing one another, or succumbing to their ailments, they continue to formulate their story whilst the theatre somehow repairs its broken utilities.
With numerous people dead, Mrs. Clark included, the writers continue to sabotage themselves, such as destroying the lighting and wasting any additional food supplies they find. The eleven remaining writers eventually group in the main theatre, only for Whittier to appear and reveal he faked his death (with Clark's help) and has been observing the writers through hidden cameras. Informing the writers their three months have passed and that they are free to leave, Whittier notes that, by continuing to blame him for everything and playing the victim to extreme extents, they haven't acted any differently to the other groups. Whittier unlocks the exit and leaves with Miss Sneezy, choosing her as the person he saves and offering her a new life. Mother Nature, objecting that they need to wait a little longer for other writers to die and for someone to rescue them, stabs Miss Sneezy. To prevent Whittier from leaving with her, they drag Miss Sneezy back inside and break the lock, and continue to wait for rescue.
Characters
The following are the 19 characters in the main narrative, along with the stories they tell:
| Character | Story | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Brandon Whittier | Dog Years | A wheelchair-bound rich man who owns the abandoned theatre and hosts the writers' retreat. Though he appears to be a very old man, he is in fact a thirteen-year-old boy who suffers from progeria. He amassed his wealth by convincing middle-aged married women to sleep with him by telling them that he was an eighteen-year-old virgin, then blackmailing them into giving him money in exchange for silence. |
| Obsolete | ||
| Tess Clark | Post-Production | A housewife turned failed amateur porn actress. Her teenage daughter Cassandra suddenly disappeared, only to be found three months later suffering from severe physical and mental trauma. Learning Cassandra was at Whittier's retreat and that her wounds were self-inflicted, Tess becomes curious as to what her daughter experienced. Upset Cassandra would never return to normal, Tess later euthanized her daughter by overdose, only to be discovered by the police. Now a fugitive, Tess became Whittier's assistant to escape the police and learn what her daughter experienced. |
| The Nightmare Box | ||
| Poster Child | ||
| Cassandra | ||
| Saint Gut-Free | Guts | An abnormally skinny man who, following a masturbation accident involving a pool filter, lost part of his lower intestine. |
| Mother Nature | Foot Work | A reflexologist and homeopathic therapy expert who was once employed in prostitution based around her skills with reflexology. She has joined the retreat to escape the Russian Mafia, after becoming an accessory to the murder of her friend's pimp. |
| Miss America | Green Room | A pregnant model who wants to become famous by promoting an exercise device on daytime television. |
| Lady Baglady (Evelyn Keyes) | Slumming | An old money woman who, along with her husband, used to pretend to be homeless as a cure for boredom. After she and her husband witness a crime leading to the murder of a wealthy Brazilian heiress, her husband is murdered by the killers, and a string of homeless people are murdered in the search for her. She comes to the retreat to escape the people who want to kill her. |
| The Earl of Slander | Swan Song | A reporter who murders a former child star to frame him for collecting child pornography, so that he can write a Pulitzer Prize-winning article about it. |
| The Duke of Vandals (Terry Fletcher) | Ambition | An amateur artist who sneaks paintings into museums. He later becomes a respected professional when he murders a famous artist as a favor to the man's patron. Believing he will suffer the same fate as the man he killed, he has come to the retreat to escape his employers. |
| Director Denial | Exodus | A social worker at a police station. She brings with her a cat named Cora Reynolds, named after its former owner, a co-worker who killed herself trying to stop police officers from using anatomically correct dolls for sexual purposes. |
| Reverend Godless | Punch Drunk | A former Marine who, with a group of soldiers, raises money by lip-syncing in drag and allowing annoyed people to assault them for a fee. He used the funds raised to start a war on religion. |
| The Matchmaker | Ritual | A man who dresses similar to a cowboy. After his girlfriend denied his marriage proposal, he hired a male prostitute to ruin her idea of the perfect man and change her mind. Rather than being autobiographical, his story is an extended "joke" he learned from his uncles, which is in fact an anecdote about a freak accident in a Nazi POW camp that saved their lives. |
| Sister Vigilante | Civil Twilight | A religious woman who carries a bowling ball, with which she may or may not have killed people. |
| Chef Assassin (Richard Talbott) | Product Placement | A professional chef who murders critics who write negative reviews of his cooking. He uses the murders to blackmail knife manufacturers, threatening to tell the world that he uses only their knives to commit his deeds. |
| Comrade Snarky | Speaking Bitterness | A woman who is critical of other women's looks. As a child, her parents divorced and her mother continually warned her that her father might sexually abuse her. Whilst never occurred, she has been wary and critical of men for her entire life as a result. She came to the writers' retreat after she and the members of a women's retreat sexually assaulted an individual; believing the individual to be a post-operative male-to-female transsexual, they assaulted her for having been born male. |
| Agent Tattletale (Eugene Denton) | Crippled | A man who continued to receive out of worker's compensation after he recovered from a severe injury. Killing a private investigator with evidence he has committed fraud, he takes the investigator's job and is almost killed by a woman on whom he spied. |
| The Missing Link | Dissertation | A member of the Chewlah tribe, who are claimed can transform into sasquatches. Dating a woman who claims a certain plane crash was caused by a girl sasquatch, The Missing Link states his sister was the girl in question. |
| The Countess Foresight (Claire Upton) | Something's Got to Give | A woman with psychic powers who experiences visions from touching objects. She was arrested for murdering the owner of an antique shop, who would not let her touch items; the items included the unborn child of Marilyn Monroe located in a milky jar of fluid. Believing the man to be Monroe's murderer, she killed him to get the antique, only to learn it was fake. She now wears an electronic tracking bracelet as part of the terms of her parole. |
| The Baroness Frostbite (Miss Leroy) | Hot Potting | A former employee of the White River Lodge, she tried to rescue a chef she employed after he fell into a nearby hot springs, only to lose her lips to frostbite in the process. |
| Miss Sneezy (Lisa Noonan) | Evil Spirits | A woman with chronic sinus problems. She claims to carry an incurable airborne disease, and was contained on an island quarantine facility by the government. Required to wear an insulated suit and oxygen mask when outdoors, she used the airtight suit to escape the island by swimming underwater to the nearest coast. |
"Guts"
The book is best known for the short story "Guts", which had been published before the book in the March 2004 issue of Playboy magazine as well as on Palahniuk's website (Palahniuk offered to let them publish another story along with it, but the publishers found the second work too disturbing [citation needed]). It is a tale of violent accidents involving masturbation, in which the reader is instructed to hold his or her breath in the very first line. While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read "Guts" to his audiences. It was reported that over 35 people fainted while listening to the readings while holding their breath. On his tour to promote Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total amount of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. The last fainting occurred on May 28, 2007, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where five people fainted, one of which occurred when a man was trying to leave the auditorium, which resulting in him falling and hitting his head on the door. Palahniuk is apparently not bothered by these incidents, which have not stopped fans from reading "Guts" or his other works.[citation needed]
A New York City public school 11th grade teacher was suspended for letting his English class read "Guts".[1]
Plot summary
"Guts" begins with the narrator telling the reader to hold their breath for the duration of the story.
The narrator then describes several unnerving incidents involving adolescent boys masturbating. First, he describes a boy inserting a lubricated carrot into his rectum to stimulate his prostate while masturbating, and then hiding the carrot in a pile of laundry. His mother later takes the laundry away and presumably discovers the lubricated carrot, but never mentions it to him. Next, the narrator describes a young boy inserting a thin stick of candle wax into his urethra to stimulate it while masturbating. The wax slips back into the boy's bladder, which causes his urine flow to be stopped almost entirely and blood to seep from his penis. It requires expensive surgery to remove it, which the parents pay for using all the money from the boy's college savings. The narrator then refers, in passing, to numerous boys of about the same age accidentally asphyxiating themselves while masturbating, a fad to which a spike in teenage suicide rates is attributed. Finally, the narrator describes an incident in which he sat on the water intake at the bottom of a swimming pool while masturbating in a process he refers to as "Pearl diving". The suction causes his rectum and lower intestines to prolapse and become tangled in the filter, forcing the narrator to gnaw through his own innards to free himself and avoid drowning. The narrator's sister later becomes impregnated by semen deposited by the narrator in the pool, which results in her having an abortion.
In the case of the three core incidents, although the parents of the boys involved knew about the incident, they never discussed it afterwards, causing all three to figuratively "hold their breath" while they waited for the reaction that never came. It is also called the boys' "invisible carrot" in a reference to the first story where the boy's mother discovers the carrot he had placed in his anus to achieve a more pleasurable orgasm.
Purportedly all three of these incidents are based on true stories. According to Palahniuk, the first two tales came from his friends' experiences and the third he heard while shadowing sexual addiction support groups as research for Choke. In one of these groups, he met an extremely thin man. When Palahniuk asked him how he stayed so thin, he told him "I had a massive bowel resectioning." When Palahniuk asked what he meant, he told him the story which was the basis for the third episode in "Guts".
Editions
- ISBN 0-385-50948-0 (hardcover, 2005)
- ISBN 1-4000-3282-2 (paperback, 2006)
References
- ^ Atchison, Chris. "Author comes back swinging: Fight Club writer says we're Haunted". Metro Toronto. June 20, 2005. (Google cache)
External links
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