Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

The epigraph for Chuck Palahniuk's "novel in stories" is a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", in which a tyrannical prince shuts his court off from the world while a plague rages outside - a grotesque rewrite of the conceit behind Boccaccio's Decameron. The line from Poe goes: "There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust."

That'll do as a description of Palahniuk's seventh volume of fiction, nor any of the preceding six. One of the stories, "Guts", gained notoriety after a number of people - by Palahniuk's count, 67 - fainted during readings by the author. The climax is certainly revolting: an obsessively masturbating teenager manages to sit on the outflow of his family's swimming-pool and has his intestines sucked out through his rectum. Not, I found, one for the lunch-hour.

The unifying device of Haunted is that a group of would-be writers have answered adverts for a "retreat" - three months sealed in a darkened theatre while each produces the masterpiece they know they have inside them. It seems they have walked into a trap; that Mr Whittier, their mentor, intends to subject them to awful tortures.

But it is the writers who subject themselves to torture. Their interest is not in writing, but in celebrity; they envisage the chat-show appearances and TV movies that will flow from their experiences, if hideous enough. Their stories are told between bouts of self-mutilation, murder and, after a while, cannibalism.

This bazooka-shot at the culture of celebrity is on target, but disproportionate. More damagingly, the relentlessness of Palahniuk's assault on our sensibilities becomes tedious. After some initial excursions into satire, even whimsy, the book doesn't offer much in the way of affect beyond horror and nausea.

Several stories work well on their own terms, mainly as camp-fire Grand Guignol, but also as adumbrations of the vacuity and solitude of modern life. One or two are twists on traditional themes: "Dissertation" does werewolves enjoyably. But it wears you out.

The blurb boasts that this is Palahniuk's "most extreme, most provocative work yet". This is not the same as profound or funny - or readable.

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