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kenderwolf 's review for:
Haunted
by Chuck Palahniuk
If you're looking for weird Palahniuk, this is definitely the right place. While I would have loved to hear Palahniuk himself read it (as I did with Choke), this is still a good read. Being an unabridged version of a sizeable book, it is very long -- 14 hours of listening on 11 CDs. There are several different voices reading, however, which is nice.
The story itself involves a group of want-to-be authors, playwrites, poets, etc. who all sign up for a "writer's retreat" that requires them to abandon their lives for three months. The idea is that they will leave behind everything that is distracting them and preventing them from completing their masterpiece. They will be provided with food and shelter and, therefore, can only bring one piece of luggage each. They cannot tell anyone where they are going and must leave in the wee hours of the morning to avoid being noticed. These restrictions limit the participants to a strange group of people, all of which have some horrible secret they are hiding from. They are all picked up on a bus and taken together to their "retreat".
Their home for the next three months is an old, dark, dusty theatre -- nothing at all like what they had expected -- and the organizer locks them all inside. They do have food, but it is all prepackaged, freeze-dried type food. They do have privacy - in the tiny dressing rooms that serve as their bedrooms. The writers are upset, but their captor will not, under any circumstances, allow them to leave until they have completed their masterpieces or the three months are up.
Over the three months, numerous things go wrong, of course, changing the retreat into a macabre survival story. Periodically, a character will step up onto the stage and tell their own story, turning the book into a kind of Canturbury Tales gone horribly awry, Palahniuk style.
The first story told in this fashion ("Guts") has been much talked about. It is undeniably very graphic and gory. Supposedly, it has caused readers to faint. (I find this extremely dramatic, but openly admit that the story is pretty horrific.) None of the rest are as bad, but this is definitely not suitable for children, the faint of heart, or the easily disgusted.
The story itself involves a group of want-to-be authors, playwrites, poets, etc. who all sign up for a "writer's retreat" that requires them to abandon their lives for three months. The idea is that they will leave behind everything that is distracting them and preventing them from completing their masterpiece. They will be provided with food and shelter and, therefore, can only bring one piece of luggage each. They cannot tell anyone where they are going and must leave in the wee hours of the morning to avoid being noticed. These restrictions limit the participants to a strange group of people, all of which have some horrible secret they are hiding from. They are all picked up on a bus and taken together to their "retreat".
Their home for the next three months is an old, dark, dusty theatre -- nothing at all like what they had expected -- and the organizer locks them all inside. They do have food, but it is all prepackaged, freeze-dried type food. They do have privacy - in the tiny dressing rooms that serve as their bedrooms. The writers are upset, but their captor will not, under any circumstances, allow them to leave until they have completed their masterpieces or the three months are up.
Over the three months, numerous things go wrong, of course, changing the retreat into a macabre survival story. Periodically, a character will step up onto the stage and tell their own story, turning the book into a kind of Canturbury Tales gone horribly awry, Palahniuk style.
The first story told in this fashion ("Guts") has been much talked about. It is undeniably very graphic and gory. Supposedly, it has caused readers to faint. (I find this extremely dramatic, but openly admit that the story is pretty horrific.) None of the rest are as bad, but this is definitely not suitable for children, the faint of heart, or the easily disgusted.