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Book Review: Haunted

By critiquing our taste for misery, Palahniuk teeters perilously close to self-examination.

by R. Schmidt | 2005.09.25

Chuck Palahniuk is Earl of the Unexpected. He has made a name for himself (and a very good one at that) by shocking us and making us think. He breaches the boundaries of the acceptable to make us question what we know about identity and culture. It has been argued, however, that his books have become formulaic: they follow a plot that he outlined years ago and has not expanded beyond; he is a nihilist whose only actual desire is to shock us into realizing that nothing we hold dear is actually true. Once he has torn down our assumptions, does he have anything in mind to replace them?

Haunted does little to dispel these criticisms. Once again, Palahniuk is reflecting American society in a distorted and less than flattering mirror. And once again we are left with the nagging question of what he is asking us to do about it. Haunted follows 19 strangers, people with attributions such as “The Duke of Vandals” and “Saint Gut-Free” rather than names, as they enter a writer’s retreat. They have signed on for 3 months of complete isolation from the outside world in order to improve their writing. As the book progresses, however, we discover that they are less interested in writing a great work than they are in taking part in a great tragedy. They are obsessed with playing out a real-life movie about how the organizer of the retreat kidnaps, starves and tortures them. Each “character” competes to tell the most tragic back story and/or experience the most harrowing events while at the retreat. Palahniuk continually draws attention to Agent Tattletale’s video camera and the Earl of Slander’s tape recorder as they record over each past calamity with each new, more shocking episode.

Palahniuk’s criticism seems obvious here: as Americans we are preoccupied with disaster. As Danny Bonaduce would say: “You have every right to slow down and look at a car wreck.” And we do. We would rather see the dark, the slimy and the unthinkable than we would the warm and fuzzy. And this is what made Chuck Palahniuk a best-selling writer in the first place. On talk show appearances he describes how people spontaneously vomit or pass out at public readings of his work. He revels in the disgust of the masses because he knows that while showing outrage, we will secretly find pleasure in this portrayal of the worst in humanity.

So now that Palahniuk has finally entered the arena of criticizing what has made him famous, what does this mean? Does this signal the end of his writing career as he politely bows out saying, “I have done more harm than good”? That seems unlikely. In fact, despite the fact that he himself is implicated in this criticism, it seems unlikely that we are supposed to focus on him at all. Obviously, this is not a condemnation of tragedy itself, nor even of the portrayal of tragedy. It is a critique of our reaction to it and fixation on it. Perhaps it is even a subtle dig at those who have read his books and expressed their revulsion.

But once again we are left with a question. Haunted effectively shows us our own faults, and, combined with his previous meditations on how we define ourselves and our society, we can see that everything we do and everything we know is wrong. But what does that mean? What would Palahniuk have us do?

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