Haunted is composed of narrative alternating with stories and poems credited to the characters in the book. The characters are people who have answered an anonymous ad for a writer’s retreat. The idea of the retreat is that they can abandon their lives temporarily in order to write great works of literature. They agree to become locked away together for three months, with no contact with the outside world.

The narrator is only partially involved in the action. He always refers to the group of writers as “we”, and seems to speak for the group as a whole, but we never find out anything about him, including his gender. Other than interweaving the narrative with the poems and stories, he has no poem or story of his own. This, combined with the feel of cold exaggeration throughout the book, does not make for a trustworthy narrator.

Even before they are locked in their secret hideaway, the would-be writers are in conflict, whining to be released even as they break the door locks so no one will be able to leave any time soon. They start out like fairly average human beings, perhaps a bit eccentric but nothing too extreme. Baseline behavior, however, quickly becomes bizarre, much in the vein of Dead Babies, by Martin Amis, and High Rise, by JG Ballard. As soon as they are isolated, they refuse to do any actual writing, and instead make up the story as they go along. Dreaming of the bestseller the story of their lives will become, they make each other into villains, and try their damnedest to become the most abused of victims.

They try to control their environment with sabatoge: breaking light bulbs, clogging toilets, contaminating food; and murder: intended, anonymous, and accidental.

None of the characters are particularly likeable, which can be good or bad depending on how you like to read. For the most part, they are named and presented as their most extreme characteristics. Mother Nature wears beads and henna and reeks of patchouli; Chef Assassin, if lacking in details, gets his point across.

In addition to the characters, it seems that no one is particularly likeable. Humans are crude and disgusting, callous and out for profit, hungry for the despair and suffering of others (not to mention a love for death and violence). After 400 pages, you might find this view depressing, although it seems happily justified: “human beings need to accept the wild-animal side of their nature…If we ignore our need to hurt and get hurt, if we deny that need and let it pile up, that’s when we get wars. Serial killers. School shootings.” To paraphrase the Missing Link even further: we have wars because we deny our low threshold for boredom.

Despite the shock value of many of the stories – disembowelment by pool suction/drain, blow jobs and slit throats, mass murder and suicide – or perhaps because of how raw you feel after actually reading about these things, many parts of the book are very funny. Even when they aren’t, many of the stories fed my curiosity and I’m embarassed to admit thinking, Is that true? Could that really happen? Do people actually do that? It felt like a book of urban legends, or somebody’s grandiose confessional.

Given the length of the book, Palahniuk’s infatuation with sentence fragments, and the shameless stories (the book opens with masturbation and evisceration), it is definitely not for everyone.

The brave (or desperate), however, will find a strong voice throughout, and thematic stories that tie in seamlessly with the the narration, until the final pages deliver just what the characters have wanted, feared, and deserved the most.