Haunted: A Novel of Stories

Haunted: A Novel of Stories

Chuck Palahniuk

Language: English

Pages: 298

ISBN: B010EWDM4Y

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight.

Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television—The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition—The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein—to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest—which means his most extreme and his most provocative.

Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: Polite Conversation, Directions to Servants and Other Works

The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture

Candide (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The Mouse On Wall Street (Grand Fenwick, Book 3)

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never again warm enough. Standing center stage, the Baroness Frostbite says, “We should forgive God . . .” For making us too short. Fat. Poor. We should forgive God our baldness. Our cystic fibrosis. Our juvenile leukemia. We should forgive God's indifference, His leaving us behind: Us, God's forgotten Science Fair project, left to grow mold. God's goldfish, ignored until we're forced to eat our own shit off the bottom. Her hands inside mittens, the Baroness points to her.

Chest nothing but dark hair and the ladder of his rib bones, he says, “When that door swings open, it's going to be too late for any of us.” He says, “So hurry.” And the Matchmaker looks at himself reflected in the big blade of the cleaver. He holds the blade out toward the Reverend Godless and says, “Help me?” The Reverend takes the cleaver. Gripping the handle in both hands, he hiss-slashes the air with it. The Matchmaker sighs, deep, in and out, and he pushes his hips against the table.

Something we could sell. The way his pumpkin belly subsided a little, going a bit flat when the pressure collapsed his diaphragm. We studied how his face, his mouth stretched open, his teeth biting for more air. More air. “An inguinal hernia,” Saint Gut-Free said. And we all said those words under our breath to better remember. “To the stage . . . ,” Mr. Whittier says, his face buried in the dusty carpet. He says, “I'm ready to recite . . .” An inguinal hernia . . . , we all echo in our.

Of her hair. The sparkling dangle of each bright earring. Her finger moves on the button. And the ticking starts again, faint and deep inside. What happens, only Cassandra sees it. The random timer starts again for another week, another year. Another hour. Her face stays there, pressed into the peephole, until her shoulders sag. She stands, her arms still hanging down, her shoulders go round and sloped. Blink-blinking her eyes, fast, Cassandra steps back and shakes her face a little. Her.

Flops on the floor, resting on his side, panting and shiny with sweat. His caftan showing billowy harem pants underneath, his wig pulled down low and warm on his head. To the Missing Link, he says, “To test your own theory,” Agent Tattletale says, “who did you kill to get here?” Evolution A Poem About the Missing Link “What will you do today?” asks the Missing Link. “How will you justify it?” That mountain of dead animals and ancestors on which you stand. The Missing Link onstage, his.

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