Description:

From Publishers Weekly

What elevates Palahniuk's best novels (e.g., Fight Club) above their shocking premises is his ability to find humanity in deeply grotesque characters. But such generosity of spirit is not evident in his latest, which charts the trials of a group of aspiring writers brought together for a three-month writer's retreat in an abandoned theater. The novel intersperses the writers' poems and short stories with tales of the indignities they heap upon themselves after deciding to turn their lives into a "true-life horror story with a happy ending." They lock themselves in the theater, reasoning that once they're found, they'll all become rich and famous. They raise the stakes of their story by first depriving themselves of phones, and then of food and electricity; eventually they cut off their own fingers, toes and unmentionables before they start dying off and eating each other. Palahniuk tells his story with such blithe disregard for these characters that it's hard not to wish he had dispensed with the novel altogether and published, instead, the 23 short stories that pop up throughout the book. For instance, "Obsolete," about a young girl about to commit state-mandated suicide, and "Slumming," about rich couples who pretend to be homeless, play so deftly with expectations and have an emotional core so surprising that they consistently, powerfully transcend their macabre premises to showcase the heart beating beneath the horrors.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From

It shouldn’t surprise that Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel is a gross out. All of his books, including Fight Club, Choke, and Lullaby, have required various degrees of intestinal fortitude. Some critics note that he’s turned the corner with Haunted, a book that has "plenty of guts, but little glory" (_Chicago Sun-Times_). Though the Portland-based proponent of Dangerous Writing continues to deliver his imaginative stories in an appealing, deadpan prose, the flat characters, questions about his intent, and the overall gross-out factor diminish this "ad-hoc diet book" as just another workshop failure (_New York Times_).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.