The narrator does not exist as a character as such in the story: the novel is written jointly by everyone in it, and yet as a result of some sleight of hand I could not discern, it is also by none of them. The narrative voice, written in Palahniuk's distinctively flat and declarative language, is a collective one. It is written with such deftness that it takes many pages before the reader realises what's going on. The book is told in the first person plural, but unobtrusively. The formal shape of the narrative is just as unusual. At least one of the stories can be seen as a stand-alone work (more on this later), but none the less this is a unitary novel of exceptional originality. Although superficially it might appear to be a fix-up (a collection of individual stories welded together in an attempt to make them seem like a novel), in fact the stories in this case are the novel. These are linked by short pieces of narrative. Haunted takes the form of 23 short stories, each introduced by a poem identifying the purported writer of the story that then follows. This most recent novel is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (404pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99)Īfter earlier novels such as Fight Club and Diary, it doesn't seem likely that anyone would pick up a book by Chuck Palahniuk incautiously, but even so the incautious should be warned.
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