If you are the type of person who considered "Reservoir Dogs" part-comedy because of its over the top violence, you may feel similarly about this. Grotesque doesn't even begin to describe it. Although more surreal than real, nothing supernatural occurs it's simply the horror that people can do to themselves and to one another. This is the kind of horror novel that's frightening in that it could (theoretically) happen.
I used to think Stephen King wrote gross horror at times ("Misery"), but this author makes Stephen King look like Nancy Drew (sorry to compare an author with a fictional character, but hopefully you get my drift). True Horror - Not for the faint of heart, stomach Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest, which means his most extreme and his most provocative. 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.
Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television: The Real World meets Alive. 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. 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. 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. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise.
0 kommentar(er)
