'You flip the switch for the heat lamp,' Mr. The story begins with a woman who has replaced her television with an aquarium containing a lizard to avoid watching the news. But one of the better stories here, entitled 'Slumming,' illustrates what can go wrong. The trouble with 'Haunted' is not conceptual the book's structure is viable, and some of its individual premises have their malevolent merits.

Or he can throw in one dead dog too many, which is what happens here. Like Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz, he can turn the revenge of the nerds into a bold feat of liberation. Palahniuk legitimately and brilliantly shocked readers, but he also opened the floodgates for wretched excess of a less inspired kind. Palahniuk's envelope-pushing bravado will contort themselves no less painfully in trying to justify 'Haunted' and its ugly overkill. When one teenage boy's effort to masturbate goes awry, he winds up with his lower intestine extracted from his body. In this crowd, that qualifies as a lucky break. Another woman's dead husband has been compressed into a three-carat diamond. 'We don't want you to die,' one of the book's wittier characters says, 'because we don't have a freezer.' Fingers and toes begin to vanish one woman is fed a cooked piece of her own buttock, made recognizable by its rose tattoo. Best case scenario: a grotesque latter-day artists' colony that will produce its own form of 'Frankenstein.' Worst case scenario: Donner party.Īs it turns out, the Donner group's notorious cannibalism is small potatoes - small, rotting, black ones - compared to what 'Haunted' will dish up. Each of these one-dimensional figures has a repellent nickname ('Saint Gut-Free,' 'Missing Link,' 'Chef Assassin'), and they are trapped together for three months to express their creative impulses.

Amazingly, in light of the book's subject matter, none of its characters are teenage boys trying to out-sicken their friends. Here's how it works: 'Haunted' is a string of gross-out fables, each accompanied by a prologue and a poem. If books had aromas, this one would reek of 'old potatoes melting into a black puddle under the kitchen sink.' Palahniuk all but dares the reader to be seasick as he explores various forms of spiritual and literal putrefaction. 'Tell me a story to make me never want to eat, ever again,' one character in 'Haunted' requests - and, boy, does the author oblige. In his new ad hoc diet book, Chuck Palahniuk assembles two dozen of the most appetite-suppressing stories he can imagine. Haunted A Novel of Stories By Chuck Palahniuk 404 pages.

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