From the Author of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters comes yet another barrage of violent, disgusting comedy sure to make you laugh, gasp and – just maybe – puke.

Haunted is the story of seventeen people who sign up for a secret writers’ retreat hosted by a secretive old man known as Mr Whittier. Finding a tiny notice in a café instructing them to bring only one luggage item containing everything they need for the three month retreat, the seemingly normal group are taken by bus to an abandoned theatre where Whittier locks them inside.

He tells them that they have all the food, heat and power they need to stay in the theatre for the duration of the retreat, but also says he will not unlock the doors until they complete their individual stories – seemingly the perfect solution to writers’ procrastination.

After a couple of days of avoiding the task of writing, each member of the retreat begins to feel it would be easier to write a story if they were suffering at the hands of a perpetrator, namely Mr Whittier, and that if they managed to “survive” their “desperate situation”, the media will subsequently buy their collective story for millions of dollars. This fictitious paranoia starts to spread and pretty soon each writer is sabotaging their food supply, breaking the heating system or causing self-harm in order to make their “story of suffering” more saleable.

As the retreat continues, the self-harm becomes more and more ridiculous until most of the characters are missing fingers, toes and starving to death as the food runs out, all the while talking about how the “public” will pay more for their story because of the tortures inflicted upon them by the evil Mr Whittier.

Haunted is written in the form of each writer’s story – from which they take their nicknames - with a brief “group interlude” between each story. While the events taking place in the house are truly hilarious and disgusting, each individual’s story of how they came to attend the writer’s retreat will be sure to have you laughing and cringing as you turn the pages. Palahniuk’s style of writing is pretty blunt, often going straight for the gross-out without really building too much suspense or depth-of-character. While his style has developed a little since the days of Fight Club and Choke, it sometimes comes across as the literary equivalent of slasher-horror films like Saw and Hostel.

Highly recommended for fans of bloody, tortuous, black comedy and earlier novels from the same author.

Rating: 3 out of 5