Haunted

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them to be precise. Twenty-two of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter — sometimes all at once. They are told by the people who have all answered the ad headlined ‘Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months’. They are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of ‘real life’ that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But ‘here’ turns out to be a cavernous and

ornate old theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world — and where

heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more

desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell — and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight. Haunted is at one level a satire of reality television. It draws from a great literary tradition — The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein — to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest — which means his most extreme and his most provocative.

Lullaby

Carl Streator is a reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for a soft-news feature.

After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It’s

a ‘culling song’ — an ancient African spell for euthanising sick or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem 20 years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude person who gets in their way. Lullaby is a comedy/drama/tragedy. In that order. It may also be Chuck Palahniuk’s best book yet.

Choke

Victor Mancini has devised a scam to pay for his mother’s medical care — pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who “saves” you will feel responsible for the rest of their lives. Multiply that by a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy income.

Fight club

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with

blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight

Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it’s only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Diary

Diary takes the form of a ‘coma diary’ kept by one Misty Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in hospital after a suicide attempt.

Once, she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom; now, after marrying Peter at art school and being brought back to once quaint, now tourist-overrun Waytansea

Island, she has been reduced to the condition of a resort hotel maid. Peter, it turns out, has been hiding rooms in house he has refurbished and scrawling vile messages all over the walls — an old habit of builders but gone nuts on his part. Angry homeowners are suing left and right, and Misty’s dreams of artistic greatness are in ashes. But then, as if possessed by the spirit of Maura Kinkaid, a fabled Waytansea artist of the 19th century, Misty begins painting again, compulsively. The canvases are taken away by her mother-in-law and her doctor, who seem to have a plan for Misty — and for all those annoying tourists...