[ im feelin this:sunny ]
[soundtrack to life : ramones-sheena is a punk rawker ]
so trusty readers, i offer you my thoughts on Haunted, by Chuck Palahniuk. if you check my earlier posts, you will find an initial post about when i started reading this book(about a month ago) and some links to audio and story of guts one of the stories involved with haunted. So on a scale of 0 to tuna can i give it a 6. ive read better books and sad to say i think that he does write the same story over and over again with different characters and plot settings but same premises, this one happened to be more than one main character and each person was going to a writer's workshop(coincidentally, chuck hosts a writers workshop on his official site here )
at this workshop, these would be authors get into wacky situations(if you can call them wacky) and end up killing eachother off, but not murder, forced suicide(if you will). the situations that the characters get into cause them to want to be the one writer that gets the events right and takes the rights to the writen work that they will finalize once the retreate is over. the whole thing is done inside an old theatre and everything inside is controlled by one mr. whittier(i dont know how to spell it because i had the audio cds). anyways the initial situations are comfortable, laundry, hot water, food etc, but the aspiring authors soon doom themselves in search of plot twists. they sabatoge every convience so that when they break out they have an awesome story to report and reap their millions, this causes people to kill cats and eat them, slice off people's asses and attempt to feed it to the slicee after she has proven to not be dead, and of course, bobit-ing themselves, and by that i mean penis cutting off.
the lenghts that the characters go to to cause carnage is a little false and unrealistic but then again whats realistic about a cult member becoming a nationwide prayer-leader agaisnt pornography and dying in a plane crash? or someone beating themselves up and mistaking it for another person and not sleeping for months? or someone going across the country in search of the purpose of a children's poem and causing deaths left and right?
the parts of the book i enjoyed the most were the accounts from the actual characters, stories they had written about their pasts, giving you an insight into who they were. some of my favourites were guts, slummin it, footwork and mr. whitter's story(i forget the name of it)
guts of course can be read from the link below, slummin it was in playboy i think and it is a story about glitteroti becoming homless for the beauty of it all, jet setting to the extreme no home etc, and mr. whitter's story is about his progeria(a disease that causes rapid aging) and how he guilted women all over into sexual favours etc. The later stories, tho, tend to be lacking in beliveability and goodness, the last one, although i liked it, was about a futuristic world where we all want to die on earth so that our souls will meet on venus and thats where the party is at, not here, so everyone has happy death kits and happily go into death awaiting the happy ending. another was about a woman in charge of the dolls used in cpr training and in child therapy sessions, but by accident the woman orders anatomically correct dolls and it causes craziness in the police department.
if you like chuck palahniuk, of course you are going to read it, if you dont know his work, read fight club or choke or survivor first, then move onto other readings. id have to say the work was good, different in setup than the others, but nothing all that special.
anyways, this has become a very long review, but i liked some parts of the book bette than others, one might say the individual accounts from the characters would have made a better book put together rather than a full plot overtop of that.
anyways im still reading diary and i think i like it slightly better than haunted, but i still cant tell, i am less wowed by his writing the more i read, still i love the way he writes so im trapped.
in love with love and lousy poetry
Kindel blogged at 2:05 PM
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