Chuck Palahniuk has built a career on exposing the insanity of our culture through disgustingly ironic cautionary tales on American commercialism. His new book does more of the same.
“Haunted” is a series of short stories, sloppily glued together by a cumbersome narrative about a bunch of wannabe writers who are kidnapped by a crazy old man named Wittier.
Responding to an ad offering total seclusion from the outside world for three months, asking only that you, “Gamble a small fraction of your life,” for a chance to create a literary masterpiece, 23 unwitting people are tricked by Wittier (Ha! Wittier, indeed) into an experiment in desperation.
He traps them in an old, ornate movie theater and bars them from leaving until they fulfill their promise to write.
Ostensibly a modern take on “The Canterbury Tales” or “The Decameron,” “Haunted” actually is a meditation on the current state of popular culture. In Palahniuk’s world, 15 minutes of fame have been trimmed down to five-minute segments (if you’re lucky) on morning talk shows and an ugly battle for stardom between reality show contestants.
The book’s characters become determined to turn their kidnapping into a salable story, each set on manipulating the drama — Cut off a finger? Sabotage the food supply? — so as to ensure their status as the star of the show.
The book’s timely plot is the perfect reflection of a summer in which “TomKat” — the nickname that’s been given to the new relationship between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes — is a story precisely because everyone thinks it’s fiction, and Janice Dickinson is fighting (and beating) reality-diva Omarosa for screen time on “The Surreal Life 3” by publicly mocking mentally handicapped children.
However, Palahniuk exhausts the high concept halfway through the novel.
By designating each story as a confession of past sins by some character in the greater narrative, the author encourages the reader to expect each one to take on a distinct personality and to reveal more about the character telling it than why we know them only as the “Duke of Vandals” or the “Lady Baglady.”
