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 chuck palahniuk 'haunted' interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The Fight Club author’s new novel isn’t a novel at all. The first thing you notice about Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, Haunted, is that there is no novel. Well, at least not in the way that Fight Club, Survivor and Choke are novels. Haunted is in fact a novella about a writer’s retreat that tangos with a collection of short stories and poems about characters with names like Comrade Snarky, Agent Tattletale and Chef Assassin, who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions and lives with hilarious and unpredictable consequences.The result of this mix of narrative styles is Palahniuk’s most literary and intriguing work. The short stories include the infamous masturbation tale, Guts, which comes with the reputation of being the sickest story ever written after several people around the globe fainted at readings. And yet it doesn’t even come close to being the grossest story in Haunted. Palahniuk has wanted to do a book of short stories for some time. The 43-year-old believes, “A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine. Whereas a novel has so much more extraneous matter in it and it’s much harder to take the plot apart. Most novels I find are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens and I don’t want to waste my time with them.”  The idea to amalgamate the short stories into a novel “projectile vomited” itself onto the writer. Palahniuk says, “Sort of at the same time as I wrote the short stories I was also writing a novella about these people who trapped themselves in a building. Then I saw a way I could work them together and alternate them. The poems were the very last thing I wrote.” Perhaps that’s why it’s the poems which often provide the most revealing insights into the minds of disparate characters like Mother Nature, Matchmaker and The Duke of Vandals. What Haunted does have in common with all of Palahniuk’s work, and indeed what makes him such an audacious writer, is its unravelling of the worst excesses of American society. But Palahniuk argues, “I never think I’m making fun of my culture. In fact I’m making fun of myself, because I catch myself doing some very stupid things.” At the moment he’s on a diet that would make Karen Carpenter proud – eating only 1,500 calories a day and drinking two-and-a-half gallons of iced water. Well, that would at least explain why the theatre that features in Haunted is packed with food that no one seems to eat.
Kaleem Aftab
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, out now published by Jonathan Cape.
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