`haunted` is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three 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.