A Passion for Consumption: The Gothic Novel in America. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Twenty-two of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning. Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem. Haunted is a novel made up of stories- twenty-three of them to be precise. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. The Gothic Body: Sexuality Materialism and Degeneration at the fn-de-siècle. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Electronic edition by Project Gutenberg. Palahniuk’s universe is crammed with sociopaths and the whole point of his fiction is seeing this world through completely depraved minds. “Teacher Suspended for Giving ‘Self-pleasure’ Reading to Students.” New York Post (9 November 2009). As a short story collection, hey, it’s classic Palahniuk: humour and horror mixed together with a heady side-order of sadism, cynicism and post-modern detachment. Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity. This article examines the rhetoric of the unclean in the novel with the use of Julia Kristeva’s category of the abject and it rereads Haunted as both an addition to and a commentary on the canon of works which capitalize on haunted spaces, fragmented bodies and the illusory nature of the lived reality.īeville, M.
Whittier, the owner of the original device and the mastermind behind the plot, turn to murder, cannibalism and self-mutilation to enhance the effect that the story of their survival will have upon its (and their) release. The readers, too, are allowed a peek into the nightmare box that the setting of the novel transforms into as its inhabitants, observed and recorded by a Mr. Here, twenty-three tales told by writers trapped in an abandoned theatre flesh out the frame narrative whose key takes the form of the “Nightmare Box,” a mysterious apparatus allowing a glimpse into the indescribable (or “the real reality”). Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest-which means his most extreme and his most provocative.Palahniuk, Haunted, horror, abject, metafction AbstractĬhuck Palahniuk’s Haunted is a novel made of stories but also a novel about the tradition of telling stories, particularly those meant to evoke terror and shock, as well as related pleasures. 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: Twenty-three of them, to be precise.