It allows Palahniuk to explore his major themes from multiple angles, but despite this freedom Haunted feels almost mathematically rote. The stories that they produce, masterpiece or no, comprise the text. There the novel’s 18 narrators spend three months in isolation in hopes of creating their magnum opus. Whittier-who, in the grand tradition of wealthy eccentrics given to odd experiments, is not who he seems (his secret being, in the tradition of Palahniuk, bizarre enough to make one simultaneously laugh aloud and squirm)-in an abandoned theater. The storytellers are all participants in an unconventional writers' retreat, held by the extremely wealthy and aged eccentric Mr. What differentiates Haunted from his other fiction is that it is a collection of short tales told by disparate, desperate characters, much like the classical works of literature that it so conspicuously mentions. Haunted is, despite all indicators otherwise, a black satire, like most of Palahniuk’s work. It isn’t: Haunted, while often disturbing and occasionally disgusting, it is not a very scary book.
Similarly, early reference in the text to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and the Villa Diodati-the country house where Mary Shelley and friends created, among other tales, the story of Frankenstein and the modern vampire archetype-might make one expect the book to be a horror novel. It doesn’t: Haunted is no more or less literary than any other book by Palahniuk. From the references to The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales in the jacket copy, one might expect Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted to establish mainstream literary credibility for its author.
0 kommentar(er)
