Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk can be a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to become precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter-sometimes all at one time. They are told by individuals who have responded to an advertisement headlined “Authors’ Retreat: Drop Your Life for 90 DAYS,” and who are led to believe that right here they will leave behind all the interruptions of “true to life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in about Haunted them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate older theater where these are utterly isolated from the outside world-and where warmth and power and, most significant, food are in more and more short supply. As well as the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the tales they tell-and the greater devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/film/nonfiction blockbuster that may surely be produced off their plight.

Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television-The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition-The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who created, among other works, Frankenstein-to inform an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly enjoyable, Haunted is usually Chuck Palahniuk at his finest-which means his most extreme and his most provocative.