‘If you were planning to be stranded on a desert island for three months, what would you bring’(Palahniuk 6)?
Haunted stands as one of Chuck Palahniuk’s most famous novels, after Fight Club, mostly due to its graphic content. Haunted was written different than Palahniuk’s other novels in that it does not end at the end and it is narrated in such a way that any character could be the narrator and every chapter has poetic structure.
‘This was supposed to be writers’ retreat. It was supposed
to be safe.
An isolated writers’ colony, where we could work,
run by an old, old, dying man named Whittier,
until it wasn’t.
And we were supposed to write poetry. Pretty poetry.
This crowd of us, his gifted students,
locked away from the ordinary world for three months’(Palahniuk 1).
It instead begins with a narration of 15 individuals as they are picked up by a bus to take them the destination of their retreat and the man who got them together as well as his assistant, Mrs. Clark, and it ends with a bang. The real names of the individuals are not necessarily given as they tell their definitive horror story that reveals why they agreed to the ad in the paper. The ad offered them a three month reprieve from the world calling it a writers’ retreat where they were to write their most self defining story. Three months of solace, three months of hell and all they have to do is write their write their greatest story.
The ‘retreat’ is a boarded up theatre with five intricately furnished rooms, a kitchen, bedrooms, and the stage that they one by one stand before their peers and confess their story. Each story is just as compelling and disturbing as the next. Our 15 guests soon begin to experience what psychologists call mass hysteria and begin to see Mr. Whittier as the ‘villian’ and Mrs. Clark as the ‘accomplice’. With this in mind they begin to sabotage themselves by poking holes into the MRE’s, burst the water pipes, breaking the furnace, the stove, even going so far as to cut off their own fingers and toes and eating the cat when they get it into their heads that they will be ‘saved’ and that when they are the public will feel sorry for them and love them and they’re stories will go down in history.
At the end of every chapter we are articulately told a story by one of the volunteers, usually just before they die. We are told more than one by Mrs. Clark and Mr. Whittier whose story stands to be the basis for the main plot, which leads to a surprise ending that even I did not figure out and made re-read the last few pages for confirmation that that was how it ended.
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Work Cited
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hauntedcvr.jpg
Palahniuk, Chuck. "Chapter 1 Page 6." Print.
Palahniuk, Chuck. "Capter 1 Page 1." Print.
Palahniuk, Chuck. "Chapter 24 Page 404." Print.
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