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A few years ago, I gave my father a copy of Haunted for his birthday, sight unseen, on a friend's recommendation.  Dad loved it - this is the man who got me into Fritz Leiber and Stephen King, after all.  A few weeks later, he vividly described one of the more horrific stories.  I didn't read Haunted until last month, but that spoiler chipped the edge of one of its best tales, so I won't sully things by showing you the trailer.

Haunted follows a group of aspiring authors at an intensive writers' retreat.  Food, shelter and equipment are provided; for two months, they will be completely cut off from the outside world, and everything that hinders them from authorial greatness.

As events progress, we see one disturbing, autobiographical tale after another from each character.  Locked in their time-sealed theater, the writers soon fixate upon the workshop ordeal itself as their magnum opus (provided it's sufficiently tragic).  Before long, food is running out, utilities are sabotaged, and everyone starts shedding pounds.  The stories grow more and more extreme.

Cue the body count.

Given free rein to bang out a score of oddball vignettes, Palahniuk gleefully casts off the shackles of extended continuity (and pacing, and characterization).

There lies my only real gripe.  Haunted is a collection of short stories, each of which devotes about ten pages to each of nineteen characters.  Palahniuk gets so busy with the "Strange Tales" slide show that he gives no reason to care about anyone.  The reader is held at bay, at a firm emotional distance. Each character writes in the same dry, deadpan voice Fight Club fans will recognize; it all sounds like Edward Norton reading poetry in a jail cell.

Which isn't to say it's not a charming, inventive piece of work.  Some of the tales are impressively disturbing, quirky or grotesque.  Some are outright hilarious.  Haunted is marketed as "horror," but the advertising boys at Doubleday Publishing would do better to call it a dark comedy.  Palahniuk sticks to his usual style - characters prowling just outside normal society; bizarre money-making schemes; and odd, real-life factoids - because he does it so bloody well.

One of Haunted's first yarns comes as close to David Foster Wallace's weapons-grade entertainment in Infinite Jest (see previous "What Luke Read" post) as we'll see in real life, outside of cursed and seditious texts.  Playboy magazine initially rejected the piece as too disturbing, then ran it after news of strange audience reactions at publicity readings began to spread.

That's as much of a spoiler as you'll get out of me.  Read it, if you've got the guts.

Infinite Jest (the book) is the best-known novel by David Foster Wallace, who died by suicide in 2008.  It comprises over 950 door-stopping pages, not counting the 80+ pages of endnotes.  It took me about 10 weeks.

The plot loosely orbits around "Infinite Jest" (the film within the book), a movie so captivating that mere seconds of viewing render one hypnotically, psychotically devoted to constant viewing, even to starvation and death.  The main characters are the students of Enfield Tennis Academy, the residents of Ennet House (a rehab facility), and the spies and terrorists in pursuit of the master copy of Infinite Jest.

Wallace weaves a Byzantine level of complexity and factual information into the story.  Topics include drug rehab, Québécois separatism, terrorism, depression, competitive tennis, dysfunctional family dynamics, toxically habitable jungles, and a government-mandated replacement of the Gregorian calendar by annual corporate sponsorship, setting most of the novel's events in Y.D.A.U., the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

It swings between poignant, horrifying, and terribly silly, and an example of that is in the sentence right before this one.  

Most of the characters are fleshed out in a caricature of humanity so ridiculous it shouldn't be so compelling. It's as if you saw every lurid detail of an elderly accountant's maddening existence; from her passive-aggressive husband, to her stultifying job, to her dysfunctional upbringing under guacamole-addicted foster parents, to the nights she steals onto the grounds of the local zoo to carefully lay down in the flamingo pen among a scattering of purloined feed, watching them adjust to her presence and eventually crowd around, her vision engulfed in soothing pink and the only sound their efficient, deafening, mastication, before she peels away in the predawn hours, clipping the guard's shack with her El Camino.

It's kind of like that.

The story is all too easy to get lost in, with constant detours and tangents on the road. Processing each one while keeping a bead on the central plot quickly becomes a higher level of the Atari classic Millipede, dispatched bugs crowding your blaster while the game careens on. Wallace only briefly indulges in the navel-gazing verbal acrobatics of "high literature."

Anyone who reads Infinite Jest should prepare for a long trek through the hinterlands, and countless unanswered questions at the end, but it's a rewarding, hilarious trek.  As one fan wrote, "Yeah, it's long.  But is it long enough?"