"Every artist is a cannibal, Every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration And sing about their grief." - Bono

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a really, really awful book. I wish I hadn’t read it. Having said that, I have to admit that when I did read it, last week, it was the major preoccupation of my free time. I couldn’t put it down, even though I regretted every new page I turned. Haunted is the literary equivalent of crack-cocaine. Once you start you can’t stop, no matter how much you want to.

Palahniuk is the writer behind Fight Club, a novel that was translated into a movie I enjoy very much. I also enjoyed two of his earlier books, Choke and Diary. Both of those books are odd, even perverse... but not too perverse. Neither of them flat out bothered me when I read them.

Stepping back from Haunted, thinking about the book as a whole, it’s fairly obvious what Palahniuk is trying to do, here. The book is an angry satire of the cult of celebrity. Palahniuk seems to be disgusted by our “reality TV” culture and the way we glorify and celebrate the worst possible behavior. I agree with the message I think the book intends to put across; that we’ve come to a place culturally where we revel in (and reward) even the most tawdry kinds of conduct on television. I agree that mass media entertainment is at an all time low. I believe, though, that in his disgust, Palahniuk has crafted a story as hideous and repugnant as the culture he’s lambasting. Maybe even more so.

The inside of the dust jacket advertises the book as a combination of The Canterbury Tales, Frankenstein, The Real World, and Alive. That’s fair, all of those elements are there. What the dust jacket doesn’t warn you about, though, is the very real gruesome level of horror that the novel conjures up. The dust jacket describes the book with words like “extreme,” “provocative,” “stomach-churning,” “mind-blowing,” and “hilarious.” Those words are fair descriptions, too. The problem is, phrases like “stomach-churning” and “extreme” have been over-used these days to the point that they don’t really mean anything.

This is a story so gruesome that reading it will literally make your stomach churn. You may, very literally, very really, have to fight back the urge to vomit.

This is a story so repugnant, so disgusting, that you may have nightmares after having read it.

All of that is fair to say about Haunted, too… and, to be honest, it’s also fair to say that the book is often laugh-out-loud funny and very, very smart.

The question is, given the strong negative reaction I had to the book, can I recommend it? Can I recommend it for it’s finer qualities in spite of it’s flaws? Can I recommend it because it did, at times, actually make me laugh out loud? Can I recommend it it for being such an addictive page-turner?

Really, I can’t.

The premise of Haunted is odd, but the satire is apparent. Haunted is the story of a writer’s retreat gone bad, told in the usual kind of exagerated Palahniuk narrative. The story is also told with poems about the characters and short stories by the characters. The organizer of the retreat really has a social experiment in mind, and he holds the writers hostage for three months. Over the course of those months, each of the captives degenerates into something sub-primitive. There isn’t a crime or an offense you can imagine that doesn’t take place at some point in Haunted. Blackmail, murder, rape, dismemberment… even sexual perversion, pedophilia, cannibalism, and self-mutilation are all elements of this story.

In order to convey the depravity of Haunted's characters, Palahniuk holds nothing sacred. Abuses are committed against people, animals, even human fetuses. This is not a book for people with delicate sensibilities. This might not even be an appropriate book for anyone with even a shred of humanity.

Palahniuk simply goes too far, and at some point he crosses the line between satirizing a corrupt culture and actually celebrating it’s depravity. I heard that same argument made against Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, a satire of the mid 90’s obsession with crime and criminals. Personally, I didn’t feel that Stone’s movie did cross that line. I think that Natural Born Killers is a justifiably hostile critique of a culture going down the tubes. I can’t say that about Haunted. There are images in this book that, once pictured in the imagination, simply serve to horrify the reader, and do nothing else.

And yet, this is an awful age, culturally, and it really is ripe for vicious parody. It needs to be parodied. If a picture is worth a thousand words, consider the following:

Hey, there’s no getting around it… Culturally speaking, things couldn’t get much worse.

As awful as it is, Haunted is a smart book with, at it's heart, a message I agree with. I appreciate the way Palahniuk skewers the fascism of political correctness in this story. Some symbols are blatantly obvious: A group of feminists commit a horrible crime against a woman as punishment for having things they don’t possess: beauty and happiness. A college student justifies her generalized attraction to American Indians by saying “I know it’s racist, but it’s the good kind of racism.” Elite socialites abandon their fundraising events for the cause of the week, stop bathing and start eating out of dumpsters because “poverty is the new wealth.” Yes, a lot of the book is brave and bluntly honest about the hollow heart of modern times.

I credit Palahniuk for crossing lines that need to be crossed. Political correctness and the cult of celebrity are awful, destructive elements of our world today, and they should be railed against. It’s a shame that, in his anger, Palahniuk seems ready to flush everything down the toilet. With the debauchery in Haunted, Palahniuk ultimately adds to the very evil that seems to be driving him mad.

Labels: Books