Haunted
Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk's 2005 "novel of stories" — a frame narrative built from twenty-three interlocking short pieces, each preceded by a free-verse poem and narrated in turn by one of seventeen would-be writers.
Answering a classified ad for a three-month writers' retreat, the group is locked inside an abandoned theater by an organizer they know only as Whittier, who promises seclusion, a stipend, and the chance to write a masterpiece. As outside contact and supplies dwindle, the writers — adopting theatrical pseudonyms such as Comrade Snarky, Miss America, and Saint Gut-Free — begin sabotaging their own utilities and rations, reasoning that a horrifying story of survival will sell better than a comfortable one. The escalation runs from self-mutilation to cannibalism before the retreat's true premise comes apart.
The book contains the short story "Guts," which Palahniuk read live on tour for two years before Haunted's publication; by his own count, 73 people fainted during those readings. Expect extreme body horror, torture, self-harm, suicide, and sexual trauma throughout.
The retreat's organizer, who lures the writers into isolation and later fakes his own death to observe how far they'll go.
Whittier's assistant and a former pornographic actress, caught between the writers and the man who orchestrated their confinement.
One of the writers-in-retreat; his contributed story, "Guts," is the book's most notorious set piece.
One of the writers-in-retreat, introduced waiting for the bus to the abandoned theater in an army-surplus jacket.
"Guts," narrated by the character Saint Gut-Free, is one of the twenty-three stories embedded in Haunted. Chuck Palahniuk performed it as a live reading for about two years before the novel's 2005 publication, and by his own tally, 73 people fainted during those readings.
Both at once — Palahniuk subtitled it "A Novel of Stories." A frame narrative about seventeen writers trapped at a retreat runs continuously through the book, and each of the seventeen narrators contributes one of twenty-three embedded short stories, each preceded by a poem.