Now.

Having just said the above, you may well be expecting me to tell you that Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, which features constant acts of extreme, disgusting ultraviolence, is in the old grand guignol tradition. But you’d be wrong. What I am here to tell you is, quite simply, that ‘Haunted’ is one of the worst, most ludicrous, sickest books I have ever read. And I’m also going to tell you, before we really start this critical post-mortem, that this review contains spoiled material – sorry, spoilers (the spoiled material is any quotes from the text). You can see which way this is going to go, so if you’re an unquestioning Chuck fan or want to read the book regardless of what my own subjective opinion on it is, bail out now.

You have been warned.

Okay. Now. This book, which I am glad I got from the Morton Grove library, and did not buy, is a series of short stories woven together with a ‘unifying’ thread. It’s about a group of 18 people who answer an ad for a Writer’s Retreat that promises to spirit them away so that they can write the ‘masterpiece’ they always idly wet-daydreamed of creating. Their mysterious literary benefactor, the ancient, wizened gnome guru Mr. Whittier, takes them to a building, locks them in, and the fun begins. Turns out Whittier’s got a hidden agenda for this gathering and he’s basically locked them up to have them tear each other apart and slowly starve them to death as they mutilate themselves thinking of how great their role is going to be in the inevitable movie of their lives and how they can make it bigger and better by doing more and more extreme things to themselves and others.

Now. First off. There are 19 different writers here, including Mr. Whittier. We establish a rhythm for the text of a chapter of the book, then a Cliff Notes-like poem by a character about their life, then a short story by that character explaining who they are and what they’re about, then a chapter of the book again, rinse and repeat. So you have 19 different literary voices writing about themselves and their lives. Or at least you would assume that this would be the case, because there is no chance whatsoever that 19 people are going to write in exactly the same way. Except, well…in this ‘book’ this is what happens.

There is no way to distinguish each character by their unique literary voice because they all write in only one voice, Palahniuk’s, in his own well-established style. Insofar as technique goes, this is a serious problem, a jarring oversight. Poor writing all round. But halfway through reading this syllabic sludge I read the interview with the author that ran on this very site last issue and I read something that made me understand this whole book and its composition a whole lot better. Palahniuk had simply gathered a load of short stories he had written over the years together (saying that short stories and novellas were a difficult sell) and written a very-loosely-fitting (if at all fitting) unifying thread so that he could clear out his drawer of all the old crap he had lying about. The minute I read this I could see how all the stories could be read as separate entities that would (shakily) stand on their own, and I shook my head in disgust. How utterly cynical. Pure lazy writing from start to finish. But I suppose when some writers achieve a certain level of fame (or infamy in Chuck’s case) they can publish their laundry list and people will buy it. And here’s the very proof of that.

And what does Chuck’s (dirty) laundry (washed in public) list reveal? Well, let’s see: cannibalism, castration, cock-eating, a constant disturbing underage sex theme, self-mutilation, eviscerating early teen masturbation (in the extremely notorious short story ‘Guts’, a disturbing work that bears the weight of urban legend – who knows if it’s true or not, it’s vile anyway), child abuse references, people cooked alive and eaten by wolves, Nazi oral sex murder atrocities, wooden splinters in a teenage character’s anus and vagina (pure vagina dentata imagery coming from a gay author like Palahniuk)…and on and on and on. Endless sanguinary loops of sociopathic, misanthropic, detailed hyper-violent imagery. And so, just for the record, let’s state something very clearly and simply:

Chuck Palahniuk is a deeply disturbed, disturbing person.

Don’t even try to argue. Just read this, or some of his other work, and you will know what I am saying is true.

Now. I must admit I did not enjoy this book at all. You might have guessed this by now. I would have stopped reading it halfway through, but wanted to finish it to review it properly, even though most of the text was just the literary equivalent of a five-year-old boy chewing his food up and then opening his mouth with the mashed-up food still in it to gross out anybody watching him. And on another trash level I was enjoying how utterly ludicrous the book kept progressively getting, with some of the worst plot ‘twists’ I have ever encountered, let alone from a supposedly major writer (‘word processor’ more like it) published by a major publisher. I almost couldn’t wait to see how much worse things would get, and I was never disappointed when reading this substandard pulp fiction equivalent of a splatter movie.

For example. Mr Whittier is presented as an old man. But when he tells his story, we learn that he is actually 13 years old, having a rare disease, which makes him appear much older. Thus he is in hospital telling nurses he is actually 18 and doesn’t want to die a virgin, so they have sex with him. Then he blackmails them for having sex with a minor (you couldn’t make this stuff up! Only Palahniuk could – and put it out thinking it was good!), before deciding that he needs a wider playground for his perversities and pathologies and setting up this Writer’s Retreat so that he can destroy more people. This is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life, and I actually laughed out loud when I read it. The character’s dialogue is nothing like the way a 13-year-old would speak and his thought processes are far too advanced for somebody his supposed age. Thus we get classic bits of the usual ridiculous Palahniuk nihilist ‘philosophy’ like this (from page 103 of the American hardback):

No, we’re only visiting, and Mr. Whittier knows that. And we’re born here to suffer.

“If you can accept that,” he says, “you can accept anything that happens in the world.”

The irony is, if you can accept that – you’ll never again suffer.

Instead, you’ll run toward torture. You’ll enjoy pain.

Mr. Whittier had no idea he was so right.

Have you ever heard so much fucking pish in all your life? Let’s briefly examine the internal (il)logic here, cos this quote fits in with something wider exhibited in this book: a pathological love of suffering and pain and death and disease and decay. So. If we’re born to suffer, we won’t be able to negate suffering by accepting it if it’s our natural lot, and we certainly aren’t going to heap atrocities upon ourselves to prove life is not hurting us. Except Chuck Palahniuk truly believes this, I think. Because Chuck Palahniuk is Catholic. And that explains one helluva lot about his worldview and psyche. The above quote is archetypal damaged Catholic life-is-joyful-joyless-suffering-oh-Lord-so-hurt-me-more-cos-I-love-to-hate-the-pain theology to the core. I didn’t know of his religious affiliation until halfway through the book, when I was doing a wee bit of research for this review. Instantly, massive chunks of what I was reading fell into place and I started to notice more and more references to God and damnation and Catholic history and torture and stations of the cross…and stuff like this below, from page 337, with reference to a religious fundamentalist character who dies an extremely gruesome death:

Here, it would be, Miss Leroy would stop talking. She’d light a new cigarette. She’d draw you another beer.

Some stories, she’d say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be.

Telling some stories, Miss Leroy says, is committing suicide.”

Now. I’d have to say that this is a pretty weird philosophy for somebody who prides themselves on being a storyteller, who goes on about this art all the time in interviews. You might say this is only a character talking, and not really Palahniuk’s core beliefs on display. Trouble is, I personally believe (though I may well be wrong, ultimately and so what, it’s only my opinion) the man believes this kind of weird stuff. Because he’s certainly not all there psychologically, let’s face it. And I’m only writing this because I started to wonder, a wee bit into this book, what kind of psyche would come up with stuff this consistently insane and disgusting and frightening and clinical. I read a few interviews with the man. Says a character in ‘Choke’ is one of the few characters he’s ever created he cares about because he based it on somebody he knew. That certainly fits in with this book, because there is not one single sympathetic character in its pages, and many of them are utterly farcical beyond belief. Says he uses humor to take the bite out of painful events, which fits in with the humor in here and in his other works.

In ‘Haunted’ there’s a quote on P338 which reads: “You can spend a whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.” This comes after hundreds of words describing, in minute clinical medical detail, human bodies and how they react when severely burned. Now. You may or may not know something very sad about Palahniuk: his father was murdered by a love rival and his grandfather murdered his grandmother before killing himself. So his father and grandparents died violent deaths, and Palahniuk had to identify his dad’s charred body (comparing the condition of his skin to charred chicken in one account I read – defensive coping mechanism, obviously), which is a truly horrible, depressing thing to have to undergo, and I can’t imagine what he felt doing it. Palahniuk is clearly obsessed with death and murder and forensic descriptions, a way of distancing himself from the reality of the events of his life or of the material he is describing and trying to deal with (though he said the exact opposite before in interview, in that he is supposedly trying to make the material more real by putting in this kind of stuff). His father was badly burned post-mortem. Hundreds of words of burn description; hiding behind a wall of facts, hmmm. Draw your own conclusions.

In any other writer describing burns in minute detail would probably seem morbid: in Palahniuk it seems both morbid and therapeutic. I think what is genuinely clear from the man’s work (and I have read all of it except the non-fiction travelogue tome he put out, and ‘Diary’, which I have a copy of I bought for $2 months ago but just haven’t read yet) is that he’s a deeply tortured individual, haunted by violent death (for obvious reasons) and trying to find some meaning in the world in, well, pretty much anything. Mr. Whittier, it turns out, has put all these people in the building they end up in to kill each other, or themselves, because he wants one of them, just one, to come back and haunt him and give him proof of an afterlife.

At the end of the book Whittier rewrites Genesis and the human race is recreated (by a couple called Adam and Eve, naturally) after a description of how life is just a processing station for people to rub against each other and smooth off their soul’s rough edges before going into the happy afterlife on another planet. Life is suffering is redemption is eternal. And that actually highlights another problem I had with this book. It sets itself up as (nominally) quasi-real, and the stories it has in it initially deal with the lives (often ridiculously over-the-top or stupid) of the people in the Writer’s Retreat, as (supposedly) written by themselves. But eventually this established rhythm goes completely awry and Palahniuk throws in stuff like supernatural stories and Genesis rewrites, seemingly wanting to totally clear out his drawers, no matter if the stories fit with the (very loose) theme or not, and it really screws up the already beyond redemption material even more. And you know, some of the actual writing itself is just plain sloppy and horrible. Take this for example, from P213:

The box was painted black.

“Lacquered,” the gallery owner said.

It was lacquered black, waxed and smudged gray with fingerprints.”

Look at that quote. Okay. It’s like Palahniuk is giving us a blow-by-blow account of what he has thought of, writing it down as he thinks of it and not editing himself. So he thinks of a box. It’s black. Lacquered. So it’s a lacquered black box. The latter is all he had to say, dammit, and all else is just poor writing and clumsy word repetition! He uses this tedious ‘repetition’ trope all the time, saying stuff like “The camera behind the camera behind the camera” repeatedly, as if it’s so smart an idea he can’t resist recycling it over and over and over. He has all his characters talking like they’re doctors, spouting endless reams of medical terminology that no normal person (not that there actually is such a thing in a Palahniuk book!) would ever use or know, and even when they’re doing things like prising off their fingernails with a knife(!) they still don’t scream or react in normal ways and thus are just two-dimensional vaguely humanoid sketches for Palahniuk to masticate and mutilate to his black heart’s desire.

There is no real humanity in the man’s books, at least emotionally: all of his characters are cool, cerebral damage cases who know obscure, pointless, occasionally interesting facts about any-and-everything that their creator must just spend hours scouring the net for then deciding he wants to work it into the text, regardless of whether it fits or not. And he’s sure never to run out of new material too, because in another interview I read he was talking about how people now come up to him at readings to tell him some sick story or secret from their own private archives because of the stuff he has put out in his writing. So he’s now the father confessor for a million sick acolytes, which is oddly fitting.

Palahniuk’s audience has long been boring one-note wannabe-nihilist Nine Inch Nails fans and now they have their own patron saint they can smear their existential excrement onto, a new gay alienated ex-druggie St Sebastian (patron saint of homosexuals, often depicted half-naked in paintings, shot full of arrows and suffering ecstatically) preaching to the perverted and alienated and sociopathic and those seeking extreme thrills. Joyous stuff indeed. He’s said that he writes to shock himself and can’t shock others unless he shocks himself first. What an aim: shocking people. No other aim, just finger-painting in blood and bone and brain and shit and proudly showing his diseased artworks to a jaded audience of sick trauma voyeurs the world over. Contemporary literature, don’t you just love it?

And yes, as I said, I have read his other work, finding it occasionally stimulating (‘Survivor’ was a truly excellent book, easily his best) but mostly uneven and stupid. Maybe this makes me a hypocrite in talking like this. But none of his other work was as extreme as this was (always found it to be easily read throwaway stuff), and I’m almost disappointed at myself for continuing to read it. It truly occasioned a lot of thought in me about what I was and am and want to read, and I have come to the conclusion that life is too short to read the ravings of sick emotionally numb people. Nothing Palahniuk writes could ever be as sick as child molestation or rape or Nazi death camps or the Rwandan massacres…so why even try? What’s the point? Why chuck even more sickness into a world chock full of it already?

Bottom line: Chuck Palahniuk clearly needs professional help. This written Heironymous Bosch painting proves it beyond question. He’s unfortunately gone through things in his life that nobody should ever have to, and they’ve clearly had a deeply profound negative effect on his mind. And you know, for all its madness and misanthropy, ultimately this book was boring as hell. If a writer can’t do anything other than make their readers feel sick or uneasy about their wordwork, there’s no point in continuing. Palahniuk is never going to be able to do enough penance for putting this garbage out, no matter how many stuffed toys he sends his sycophantic psycho fan tic supporters to weirdly reward them for their loyalty to him (or apologize for smearing them with sick shit). I hope his story drawer is empty. This book deeply offended me and is an absolute fucking disgrace, a super-cynical insult to writing and humanity, and should never have been published. And if the writer was to be honest, he’d agree with me.

Here endeth the lesson.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.