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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
It's so hard to talk about this book without ruining anything, but I'm gonna do my best. Was it gross? Yeah, kind of, but nothing that made me wanna scream and shout and cry and throw up like so many reviews would lead you to believe. It's an interesting kind of horror and gore he's used. Is it effective? Absolutely. But not in the way you would have yourself believe. And that's what blows my mind the most about this book
Now, I knew going into this book that it would be completely different from anything I've ever read before, but I still didn't expect to come out of this story feeling the way I felt. It took me MONTHS to get through this book; partly because a previous book had put in a slump that I just could NOT shake, mostly because every story, every chapter, every poem and character in this story will unsettle you in one way or another. Never in a book have I seen such an accurate yet horrifying portrayal of humanity. I've never before felt such simultaneous disgust and sympathy for a group of fictional (based on non-fiction, terrifyingly enough) characters. Chuck Palahniuk is no stranger to the strange and twisted, the darkness in morality that blurs the lines between right and wrong, but there's just something so different and special about this novel. I'll admit, with every new chapter I started I got more and more frustrated, more and more detached from the story. A few chapters in particular shook me so hard I literally couldn't process the story until I put it down and gave myself a few days to think about what happened. I couldn't hide my contempt for the choices he made with his story telling and I didn't think I would be able to forgive him for making me feel so uncomfortable and invaded and unsafe in the world... Until I got to the end. Do I feel comfortable? No. Do I feel any less gross for reading it? Definitely not. But now I understand that that was his whole point all along.
Now, I knew going into this book that it would be completely different from anything I've ever read before, but I still didn't expect to come out of this story feeling the way I felt. It took me MONTHS to get through this book; partly because a previous book had put in a slump that I just could NOT shake, mostly because every story, every chapter, every poem and character in this story will unsettle you in one way or another. Never in a book have I seen such an accurate yet horrifying portrayal of humanity. I've never before felt such simultaneous disgust and sympathy for a group of fictional (based on non-fiction, terrifyingly enough) characters. Chuck Palahniuk is no stranger to the strange and twisted, the darkness in morality that blurs the lines between right and wrong, but there's just something so different and special about this novel. I'll admit, with every new chapter I started I got more and more frustrated, more and more detached from the story. A few chapters in particular shook me so hard I literally couldn't process the story until I put it down and gave myself a few days to think about what happened. I couldn't hide my contempt for the choices he made with his story telling and I didn't think I would be able to forgive him for making me feel so uncomfortable and invaded and unsafe in the world... Until I got to the end. Do I feel comfortable? No. Do I feel any less gross for reading it? Definitely not. But now I understand that that was his whole point all along.
Completely idiotic characters, but the descriptions stuck with me. Still remember the events vividly even though I finished this book a while ago. This was my first Palahniuk book. Evidently not a good first book to start out with.
An interesting read to be sure, but I felt like the author was trying very hard to come up with every most-gruesome thing he could think of. He did a pretty good job at that, actually. The psychological dysfunction and social commentary that he was aiming for fell flat, but he did completely gross me out more than once.
Absolutely amazing but absolutely not for everyone.
TW: All of them
This book contains so much violence, gore, and just depraved acts of humanity but it's all for a point.
TW: All of them
This book contains so much violence, gore, and just depraved acts of humanity but it's all for a point.
TW: All of them. Literally, if you have triggers, do not read this book or find details of which stories to skip. (I get it's horror, but come on.)
It has been awhile since I've given a book a 1 star. You have to reaaally piss me off for it. Congrats. My 1 star doesn't even have to do with the trigger warnings (though admittedly one part is definitely the transphobia throughout which can be considered a trigger).
There were maybe two or three decent stories, though unfinished plots for most of them. The female characters are written, well, like they're written by a man. Shocker. The physical descriptions, even as satire, are practically impossible.
Additionally, the back of the book doesn't even accurately describe the plot of the book. These people literally did everything TO THEMSELVES. They are characters it is practically impossible to like and essentially the book is here to remind you that all people suck and are pieces of shit only out for themselves. Get a new theme.
It has been awhile since I've given a book a 1 star. You have to reaaally piss me off for it. Congrats. My 1 star doesn't even have to do with the trigger warnings (though admittedly one part is definitely the transphobia throughout which can be considered a trigger).
There were maybe two or three decent stories, though unfinished plots for most of them. The female characters are written, well, like they're written by a man. Shocker. The physical descriptions, even as satire, are practically impossible.
Additionally, the back of the book doesn't even accurately describe the plot of the book. These people literally did everything TO THEMSELVES. They are characters it is practically impossible to like and essentially the book is here to remind you that all people suck and are pieces of shit only out for themselves. Get a new theme.
absolutely wild. truly disturbing yet not exactly terrifying.
Hate - Haaaaaayte - this book. The loooong descriptions of the smell of cooking human flesh or of cannibalism or of rotting corpses. The array of reprehensible characters. The lengthy amounts of self mutilation. This book is designed to repel and repulse. And I waved back and forth between giving it one star as crap I’ll never read again and that I slugged through because once I decided I can’t stand it I already was invested in finishing, or giving it multiple stars because it’s as much talent to paint a picture of disgust as it is to paint a picture of sunflowers, I think. Good work, I will gladly get rid of this and never read it again.
In order to understand this book, it helps to know a little about its genesis. Haunted began its existence as a collection of short stories, but collections don't sell so well and Palahniuk wanted to receive maximum return for his investment. By incorporating in a novella he had been working on as a framing narrative, he was able to release the book as a novel and ensure better sales.
The best way to read the book is as a short story collection, which the publisher has made easy for the reader to do. Turn to the back page. There you'll see a list of all the short stories. You can read them in order, or just hop around as you would with any other short story collection.
These aren't all winners, which is generally true of short story collections, but there are some real gems.
The best is probably the Cassandra sequence, which includes "The Nightmare Box," a nice Twilight Zone-style tale of confronting the unnameable. It's one of the few stories that dips into the supernatural, as Palahniuk prefers finding the frightening or weird in the everyday.
The most infamous story is "Guts," in which a teen has an unfortunate incident at the bottom of a pool. It has a tense, sickening claustrophobia that shows the full potential of Palahniuk's take on horror. Though not all of the stories are quite so visceral, most manage a twisted idea or two, sometimes used to humorous effect.
"Speaking Bitterness" involves a women's support group where things take an odd turn, and recalls Shirley Jackson's tales of the terror that lurks beneath the domestic. "Civil Twilight," about a city threatened by a seemingly invisible monster, creates a convincing atmosphere of dread, but unfortunately the end is a little weak, as if the author got bored with writing a horror story. "Dissertation," though a little on the talky side, is an interesting twist on the werewolf legend. "Crippled" finds the narrator trapped in a shed as a woman he's been spying on plots how best to get rid of him.
There's admittedly a few duds. "Swan Song," about a journalist on the outs trying to score a big story, isn't scary or tense at all, and its anti-journalism stance is so one-sided it could have been ghostwritten by Dean Koontz. "Evil Spirits" has an interesting variation on the killer plague concept, but Palahniuk's style is so at odds with the way that the narrator (a very sheltered 22-year old woman) would speak that I felt jarred out of the story. "Ambition," about an artist who figures out how to get his paintings into museums, starts strong but sort of fritters away into a half-hearted satire on the art world.
Once you've read all of the stories, you can go back and read the novella and the "poetry." (I write it in scare quotes, because Palahniuk is of the "it's poetry because the formatting is all different" school of poetry. The book may start with an epigraph from Edgar Allen Poe, but Palahniuk has no interest in naughty rotten rhyming.) The "poetry" is mostly inoffensive if forgettable.
As to the novella, well, the premise is that the characters are all the narrators of the collected stories. They end up locked in a building, telling each other their various stories. It sounds like an intriguing set-up, but unfortunately this is the weakest part of the book.
It's clear Palahniuk banged it out in a hurry. It's lazily written, terribly sloppy and lacking Palahniuk's usual sense of headlong pace. Gone, too, are the sometimes fascinating characters that populate his fiction, replaced by complete cartoons with nothing in the way of personalities or plausible motivations. Palahniuk compensates by upping the shock value but in a way that quickly becomes tedious. (Unlike in the stories, where the outre elements tend to be more effective.)
I know I'd rather pick up a good short story collection than a mediocre novel, which is why I strongly recommend starting with the stories.
The best way to read the book is as a short story collection, which the publisher has made easy for the reader to do. Turn to the back page. There you'll see a list of all the short stories. You can read them in order, or just hop around as you would with any other short story collection.
These aren't all winners, which is generally true of short story collections, but there are some real gems.
The best is probably the Cassandra sequence, which includes "The Nightmare Box," a nice Twilight Zone-style tale of confronting the unnameable. It's one of the few stories that dips into the supernatural, as Palahniuk prefers finding the frightening or weird in the everyday.
The most infamous story is "Guts," in which a teen has an unfortunate incident at the bottom of a pool. It has a tense, sickening claustrophobia that shows the full potential of Palahniuk's take on horror. Though not all of the stories are quite so visceral, most manage a twisted idea or two, sometimes used to humorous effect.
"Speaking Bitterness" involves a women's support group where things take an odd turn, and recalls Shirley Jackson's tales of the terror that lurks beneath the domestic. "Civil Twilight," about a city threatened by a seemingly invisible monster, creates a convincing atmosphere of dread, but unfortunately the end is a little weak, as if the author got bored with writing a horror story. "Dissertation," though a little on the talky side, is an interesting twist on the werewolf legend. "Crippled" finds the narrator trapped in a shed as a woman he's been spying on plots how best to get rid of him.
There's admittedly a few duds. "Swan Song," about a journalist on the outs trying to score a big story, isn't scary or tense at all, and its anti-journalism stance is so one-sided it could have been ghostwritten by Dean Koontz. "Evil Spirits" has an interesting variation on the killer plague concept, but Palahniuk's style is so at odds with the way that the narrator (a very sheltered 22-year old woman) would speak that I felt jarred out of the story. "Ambition," about an artist who figures out how to get his paintings into museums, starts strong but sort of fritters away into a half-hearted satire on the art world.
Once you've read all of the stories, you can go back and read the novella and the "poetry." (I write it in scare quotes, because Palahniuk is of the "it's poetry because the formatting is all different" school of poetry. The book may start with an epigraph from Edgar Allen Poe, but Palahniuk has no interest in naughty rotten rhyming.) The "poetry" is mostly inoffensive if forgettable.
As to the novella, well, the premise is that the characters are all the narrators of the collected stories. They end up locked in a building, telling each other their various stories. It sounds like an intriguing set-up, but unfortunately this is the weakest part of the book.
It's clear Palahniuk banged it out in a hurry. It's lazily written, terribly sloppy and lacking Palahniuk's usual sense of headlong pace. Gone, too, are the sometimes fascinating characters that populate his fiction, replaced by complete cartoons with nothing in the way of personalities or plausible motivations. Palahniuk compensates by upping the shock value but in a way that quickly becomes tedious. (Unlike in the stories, where the outre elements tend to be more effective.)
I know I'd rather pick up a good short story collection than a mediocre novel, which is why I strongly recommend starting with the stories.
This was about where Palahniuk's redundancy was starting to become obvious, and his go-for-the-grossest-shock-ever strategy was becoming predictable. I was not impressed with the stories in this anthology, and was bored by the antics of the through-running plot.