One Down

I mailed my Columbia application in today, complete with personal statement, writing sample, and literary essay. It's been a while since I've written a literary essay. Readers of this blog (both of you) will know that, from time to time, when my fancy is tickled, I like to review theatrical pieces I've seen. But it's been a long time since I've written a really thought-out review for a piece of literature. I ended up with a review of Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted that I was pretty happy with, so I thought I'd include it here. Enjoy.

Caulk in the Mosaic: A Critical Response to Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted

In the afterword to the paperback edition of Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk laments that the first time he read the story “Guts” out loud, nobody fainted. He seems genuinely saddened and he solidifies that impression by going on for the next six pages, recounting in great detail the various fainting incidents at bookstores and universities around the world, about the medical causes of fainting, about his editor telling him he’d, “done enough damage with this story.” Much of the afterword gives the impression that Palahniuk only wrote Haunted as a device to make people faint, since it’s about the only aspect of the book he sees fit to mention. Fortunately, somewhere in the last paragraphs of his essay, he comes to something resembling a reason for writing the book:

“My goal was just to write some new form of horror story, something based on the ordinary world. Without supernatural monsters or magic. This would be a book you wouldn’t want to keep next to your bed, a book that would be a trapdoor down into some dark place. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover.”

Those are brave goals. Never mind that horror novels have tried, pretty much since their conception, to create a safe place for their audiences to explore the darker side of their nature, whether their monsters are supernatural ones or real-life. It’s always admirable for a writer to set out with more than just story in mind, and the horrors of every day life are worth exploring anew by each generation of horror stories. It’s an ambitious goal, which makes it particularly disappointing that the book falls so very short of its mark.

Haunted’s structure is its failing. Palahniuk chose to write Haunted as twenty-three short stories bound together by a framing narrative about would-be writers at a month-long retreat. This form is called a mosaic narrative and, done well, it can be a subtle but effective way to express an idea or a mood. It can be a great form for horror, which works best when it creates the almost subliminal feeling of just waking from a nightmare. Unfortunately, mosaic narrative requires a great deal of delicacy and finesse to pull it off, and this is where Palahniuk falls short.

Taken just as a book of short stories, Haunted would be worth reading. Stories like “Evil Spirits,” about a girl who escapes from a secret island where the U.S. Navy quarantines carriers of deadly diseases, or “Dissertation,” about a tribe of Native Americans who carry a gene that makes them periodically turn into monsters are interesting reads and evocative of modern fears about disease and strangers, but they can hardly be called horrors of the “ordinary.” The very best of the stories in Haunted, “The Nightmare Box” and “Poster Child,” tap into a relatively simple and genuine kind of horror: the horror of being stripped of mirth by something as simple as an idea.. In and of themselves, the stories are decently written. Even where they don’t entirely work as horrors—really, what’s so horrific about the rich urbanites in “Slumming” pretending to be bag ladies for kicks?—they are entertaining enough that they would warrant sitting down for an afternoon to read them.

Where Haunted falls apart is in Palahniuk’s attempt to jerry-rig a novel out of a book of short stories. A braver writer could have done it. Someone who trusted his stories to speak for themselves could have built a mosaic out of them with just the thinnest of outlying structures. Palahniuk almost does it—each story is preceded by a poem about its narrator, which could have worked nicely as a framing device. But Palahniuk, seemingly unwilling to lose his audience to subtlety and nuance, had to drive his point home with a sledge. So he built a monster of a framework in the form of a half-realized story about people in a writer’s retreat sabotaging their lives and their writing through their collective need for drama. That’s great, or could it be, but the ultimate point he makes in this framing narrative—that we’ve become drama obsessed as a society—feels forced on to the rest of the book. It’s as though he had an idea for a book of horror stories, but feared that their point wasn’t self-evident enough, so he foisted a half-realized narrative about media obsession on them. As a result, rather than helping the stories and binding them together, the framework gums up the flow of the book. In the rare cases where his interludes are short, they’re readable, but as Haunted comes to a close, Palahniuk labors ever harder to make his point fit the rest of the book, and his hand becomes all too visible moving in the stories.

What’s more, rather than giving his characters actual names, he labels them with condescending epithets like Miss Sneezy, Comrade Snarky, The Missing Link, essentially removing any chance that his readers will find actual horror in their stories. For a horror story to really work, the reader has to be able to see themselves in it. The reader of a horror story has to be able to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” In naming his characters as types and epithets, Palahniuk makes the stories safe for his readers by taking them outside of the story. It gives his readers permission to view his drama mongering character, not as extensions of themselves, but as something other than them. They can say, “I’m not the one who gets caught up in this trap. It’s the Comrade Snarkys of the world.”

Haunted set out with an ambitious goal in mind, but to reach such an ambitious goal takes a writer willing to stick out his neck and let his work stand on its own. Chuck Palahniuk is never willing to keep his hand from meddling in his stories, and the end result is that, rather than giving his readers a trapdoor into a dark place, Haunted hands them a shallow basement full of dull frights and penny-dreadful shocks.