Haunted

*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.