I'm not a prude nor do I have problems with his graphic content. Well I've read/listened to Chuck's other books and I really like his gritty style.
If you can stomach that, then go ahead and listen to the rest of the book.
HAUNTED CHUCK PALAHNIUK SPARKNOTES FREE
WARNING: Due to the extreme and hideous nature of this novel, before you spend the money or use up a book credit, do yourself a favor and listen to the free excerpt from this book entitled "Exodus." It's 44 minutes long and is completely self-contained. I'm not saying this so that your morbid curiousity may cause you to give this book a try, really. Think of the sickest, most taboo thing anyone could ever do, then multiply it by ten and then you'll have this book. It used to be that I was unable to even think about certain types of torture, death, and I wanted to stop listening at least a dozen times, but then I thought, "No, I'm not going to allow a group of common words that someone placed in a certain order get the better of me." And in that way, this book caused me to grow as a person. My greatest challenge was simply to finish it.
If you drift away from that mindset, you may never sleep again. If you've ever laughed at the type of cartoon violence like when the Coyote is flattened in his failed attempt to catch the Road Runner, then you might be okay with this book, so long as you can think of it in that context. If you are the type of person who considered "Reservoir Dogs" part-comedy because of its over the top violence, you may feel similarly about this. Grotesque doesn't even begin to describe it. Although more surreal than real, nothing supernatural occurs it's simply the horror that people can do to themselves and to one another. This is the kind of horror novel that's frightening in that it could (theoretically) happen. I used to think Stephen King wrote gross horror at times ("Misery"), but this author makes Stephen King look like Nancy Drew (sorry to compare an author with a fictional character, but hopefully you get my drift). True Horror - Not for the faint of heart, stomach Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest, which means his most extreme and his most provocative. 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. Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television: The Real World meets Alive. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell, and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight. But "here" turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world, and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who 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. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise.