Haunted Audiobook (Free)

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk can be a novel composed of stories: Twenty-three of these, to be precise. Twenty-three of the very most horrifying, amusing, mind-blowing, stomach-churning stories you’ll ever encounter-sometimes all at one time. They are told by individuals who have responded to an advertisement headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Give up YOUR DAILY LIFE for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will keep behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that’s in about Haunted them. But “here” actually is a cavernous and ornate previous theater where they may be absolutely isolated from the exterior world-and where heat and power and, most significant, food are in progressively short supply. As well as the even more desperate the conditions become, the more extreme the stories they tell-and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/film/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made using their plight.

Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television-The REAL LIFE meets Alive. It attracts from an excellent literary tradition-The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein-to inform an utterly contemporary tale of individuals eager that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is certainly Chuck Palahniuk at his finest-which means his most extreme and his most provocative.