The style is the book, and it is a substantial constituent of the appalling events that are described throughout the novel. This innovative approach is not a gimmick. The narrator does not exist as a character as such in the story: the novel is written jointly by everyone in it, and yet as a result of some sleight of hand I could not discern, it is also by none of them. The narrative voice, written in Palahniuk's distinctively flat and declarative language, is a collective one. It is written with such deftness that it takes many pages before the reader realises what's going on. The book is told in the first person plural, but unobtrusively. The formal shape of the narrative is just as unusual. At least one of the stories can be seen as a stand-alone work (more on this later), but none the less this is a unitary novel of exceptional originality. Although superficially it might appear to be a fix-up (a collection of individual stories welded together in an attempt to make them seem like a novel), in fact the stories in this case are the novel. These are linked by short pieces of narrative. Haunted takes the form of 23 short stories, each introduced by a poem identifying the purported writer of the story that then follows.
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