What is most intriguing about the book is precisely the relationship between the narratorial voice and the stories being told. This is further complicated by the fact that all the narrators are labelled with titles rather than specific names – Saint Gut-Free, the Duke of Vandals, Mother Nature, and the Earl of Slander to name but a few. At the same time, each story is told by a specific character, who plays a role in the narrative device, thus suggesting a more complicated link than a simple plot device.

Certainly the stories work, for the most part, independently of each other and the narrative device holding the novel together. So, how is one to take this book? As a novel? As a collection of short stories? As a classic fix-up novel, where the short stories are only superficially related to the conceit of the book? The answer is probably all of the above. There are allusions to other story collections such as The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. We’re reminded, by the author, of the Villa Diodati, the lakeside residence where Byron and a group of elite guests like Mary Shelley recounted stories to amuse themselves. For ‘best’ one could substitute ‘most shocking’. Each writer is obsessed both with being the sole survivor of an extraordinary ‘reality’, while at the same time writing the best story. It is a collection of twenty-three stories, wrapped up in a conceit, that of a group of writers locked away in a writer’s retreat that descends into a cross between Big Brother and Lord of the Flies. Palahniuk is, above all, a writer who works with form, and Haunted is perhaps his most ambitious work to date in this sense. While the hype surrounding Guts may be overblown (over 70 people have fainted at events where the author has read the story aloud), virtually every story in this collection manages to twist and turn, leading the reader to the unexpected. For generations reared on slasher movies and formula horror, Palahniuk’s intelligent writing will reawaken a too often dulled sense of shock. The ghosts that float through the various stories are eternal moments of shame and humiliation that haunt individual characters.

Palahniuk is interested in horror, and the horrific, but not ghosts, vampires or goblins.

Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, Haunted, is filled with blood and guts (to the extent that one of the twenty-three short stories that form part of this “novel of stories” is entitled Guts), but precious little of the supernatural.

Haunted by chuck palahniuk guts