Short Stories: Recently, Chuck Palahniuk has taken to throwing severed hands into the audience at readings. Plastic severed hands, obviously. He autographs fake vomit and sends stick-on "slashed wrists" to fans.
Haunted is the literary equivalent of throwing severed hands at the audience. The author of Fight Club has produced a series of grotesque short stories dressed up as a novel. Each story is brutal and short. Some are genuinely gut-wrenching. One is literally about a gut-wrenching. You will want to put down your lunch before picking this up.
Palahniuk's interest in the macabre and the horrific goes deeper than joke-shop props. As a child he would stay in the house in which his grandfather killed his grandmother. His own father was murdered by his lover's husband. And Palahniuk's writing has always been forceful. Actually, it's not so much forceful as relentlessly pounding. It is fuelled by machismo and unapologetically gross. He has no interest in slowly pacing these stories, but goes straight for the gag reflex.
The novel's plot involves a group of people who answer an ad offering three months at a writers' retreat, at which they will write their masterpieces away from all distractions. They go by nicknames - such as Saint Gut-Free, Missing Link and Agent Tattletale - each of which is explained by the stories they tell. Trapped in a boarded-up theatre, they hope to mimic the gathering at Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley, Byron and Polidori read ghost stories to each other, and then created both Frankenstein and a story that eventually inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Haunted's writers, though, quickly turn feral. They mutilate themselves in a variety of novel ways in the hope of placing themselves at the centre of the story, and with each outrageous, repulsive act recorded on paper, tape and video, Palahniuk gives us a serrated satire on the media obsession with the cult of victimhood.
In between, characters are introduced through flat, observational poems, and then through stories. Foot Work is a comic tale about the fatal power of alternative medicines. In the disturbing and explicit Exodus, a police station worker tries to protect two anatomically correct child dolls from her colleagues. In Product Placement, a serial killer commends the company that manufactures his favourite knives. There are echoes of Fight Club in Slumming, in which toffs gather to live as hobos, and Punch Drunk, in which a mysterious mission is financed by men who dress as women, visit bars and hire themselves as punchbags.
Does it work as a novel? Not always. It is fragmented and padded, with the stories loosely linking with the overall plot until it eventually begins to coalesce. Does it work as a collection of short stories? Definitely. These are proper short stories: tales with a beginning, middle, twist and end. They are suburban horrors, about American neuroses, paranoia, futility and identity. But they are as much about the body as the mind. Palahniuk wallows in the biological, describing in vivid detail the melting of a body or the cannibalisation of a person not yet dead. And he does not write about gore unless he can write about sex too, or filth or illness. Or all of them together. It is gross and it is repulsive. And great reading.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
Haunted By Chuck Palahniuk Jonathan Cape, 404pp. £10.99
