It burps up its shock moments with so little ceremony that the Gothic virtue of stealthily sidewinding suspense - the art of allowing a story to steal up on you before you even knew it was there - is left whistling in the wind. One immediate side effect of this method is that "Haunted" remains stubbornly unscary. Palahniuk digs up some disgusting factoid he devises a narrator to deliver the disgusting factoid and then sits back to watch him or her deliver it. The single most horrifying fact about "Haunted," though, is that his publishers have called it "a novel," which turns out to be a cunning euphemism for "a collection of short stories." The stories all follow much the same course. Palahniuk's work feels raw but insular, angry but self-coddling, like a teenager's moods. Palahniuk's work has a tone of snarling X-rated confrontation, but reading his stuff is uncannily like being buttonholed by your younger brother and led up to his bedroom so he can show off his book of Weegee photographs. The curious weakness of Palahniuk's neo-brutalist aesthetic is how hermetically sealed it must remain from anything that might challenge it: the air of hard-core debauch must be wall to wall or else crumble to nothing. What would be really shocking, of course, would be if one of them turned out to be Anita Brookner. Couldn't one of these aspirant literary geniuses have turned out to be - I don't know - an old-fashioned pastoralist, or a delicate minimalist in the manner of Raymond Carver? Instead they all go under mythico-thuggish names like The Earl of Slander and The Duke of Vandals, sport complexions the color of dog food ("red-raw meat around a nose and eyes, steak stitched together with thread and scars") and write stories whose themes range, in a timely tribute to the global compendiousness of Saul Bellow, from the queasily gynecological to the queasily gastrointestinal. "the dark side of reflexology" in "Post-Production," a couple shoot porn movies together to pay for the cost of raising a child ("instead of some old birthing video, someday they'd show their child his conception") in "Guts," a young man manages to unspool most of his large intestine while masturbating on the bottom of his swimming pool. In "Foot Work," one of several "colonic-irrigation assassins" takes us on a tour of It's nothing but Chuck here, sliced and diced. Any hopes, however, that what follows will amount to a searching drama of collective literary endeavor - egos clashing, fur flying, a sort of "Survivor" for the creative writing set - are immediately dashed by the discovery that all of Palahniuk's writers turn out fiction that bears a startling resemblance to the fiction of Chuck Palahniuk. The new book, "Haunted," takes its cue from the old story about Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and friends holing up in the Villa Diodati during a thunderstorm and brainstorming the stories that would form the basis of "Frankenstein" and "The Vampyre." In Palahniuk's version, 17 writers answer an advertisement for a writer's retreat and hole up in a cavernous theater for three months to write their masterpieces.
#Haunted chuck palahniuk tpb series
It was made into a Brad Pitt movie, which must have really hurt, but Palahniuk recovered nicely, and was soon furthering his reputation with a series of fragrant odes to the milk of human kindness: "Survivor," in which a man dictates his life story into the black box recorder of a plummeting 747 "Choke," about a man who pretends to choke in restaurants and then emotionally blackmails those who attempt to save him and "Lullaby," which gently broached the topic of infant genocide. Palahniuk first came to light with "Fight Club" (1996), the story of a group of young men who seek to escape the numbing conformity of their 9-to-5 jobs by being beaten to a bloody pulp. Opinion is still divided as to whether his oeuvre amounts to a tenacious attempt at reinventing the Gothic tradition for the 21st century, or a sustained, career-long attempt to put you off your lunch. When a story from Chuck Palahniuk's new book was serialized in The Guardian of London, it was flagged on the cover as "the most gruesome short story ever published," a come-on that tells you all you need to know about the allure of Palahniuk's work, which is best thought of as a close literary relative of NBC's "Fear Factor," in which contestants compete to see who can best retain their composure while being deluged with buckets of bugs.
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