Книга: Haunted (Palahniuk); Random House UK, 2016

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them to be precise. Twenty-two of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you`ll ever encounter - sometimes all at once. They are told by the people who have all answered the ad headlined`Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months`. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of`real life`that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But`here`turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell - and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight. Haunted is at one level a satire of reality television. It draws from a great literary tradition - The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein - to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest - which means his most extreme and his most provocative.