My $.02: Book Review - Haunted

There is this group of people on internet message boards who put links in their posts that say there something funny or cool or relevant to the conversation. Some of these links are genuine. Others are harmless pranks, Rick Rolls or Bananaphone links. Some of these links though, are something dangerous. One innocent click, and you're presented with a horrific image or video that, depending on your sensitivity, potentially damage you, something that will shake your belief in the general good of humanity, and most importantly, something you can never un-see.

This, in a nutshell, is Haunted.

This is a book that is not interested in frightening you so much as making your stomach turn. Endlessly. Seriously, it's the literary equivalent of dead baby jokes - it doesn't fulfill any need other that trying to see who can be the grossest.

Now maybe that's someone's thing, but it isn't mine. When I rent a horror movie, it's either because I want it to be creepy, a la The Others or The Sixth Sense, or I want the horror and gore to be done in a campy, we-know-how-silly-this-all-is style like Army of Darkness or Planet Terror. In books, I want the same thing. What I don't want is detailed descriptions of stomach churning goriness.

There were two factors that made this extra painful, the first being that this was a collection of short stories wrapped in one larger story arc about a group of kidnapped writers lured by a writers retreat. This was painful because when you're faced with a bunch of short stories, you know the results are going to be hit or miss. That's just the nature of short story collections. This book, however, was way more misses than hits. Out of over twenty short stories, I would only call two of them interesting, and only one of those good.

Worse than this was the fact that all of the stories, including the main arc, are predicated on the idea that people are essentially awful. Every action is based on pure selfishness, but even that isn't enough of an assumption. In order to accept, at face value, any of the various stories, you have to accept that nearly everyone is a murderous, perverted freak only being kept in check by the law or something like it. We're all potential pedophiles or such attention whores that self-mutilation and murder is acceptable if it brings us fame. I don't know if Chuck's mother didn't hug him enough as a child or what, but this is taken to such an extreme that it ends up being so far from realistic that by the end I couldn't take any of it seriously at all.

So there you have it. What I believe was supposed to be a statement about the nature of celebrity, about our obsession with tragedy, about the way media effects our lives was completely lost in a stew of body parts and "what's grosser than gross" descriptions. It's too bad really. Palahniuk seems to have a fairly extensive vocabulary. "Subtlety", however, seems to be missing from it.