Carrie's Reviews > Haunted

This book is vile. It is disgusting. No matter how much you can take, you will squirm and say "Oh My GOD!" out loud on the bus or plane or couch or wherever it is you read. It is a nasty book. But Haunted is so much more than that and so worth reading.

Haunted is set in a drab old theater, past it's prime, boarded up, invisible, and impenetrable to the outside world. Inside the theater are 23 characters. 23 people with names like the Earl of Slander and Agent Tattletale. Each character is introduced with a poem and a story. Usually gruesome or grotesque, the stories eventually create the world each person inhabits, explain why they agreed to drop off the face of the earth for a while, and how they relate to the other characters in the book. Narratives in between the character stories relate what's happening within the hotel. How the characters are coping with no modern amenities or food, who has died and what the remaining characters will do to themselves and others to obtain fame and sympathy once they're rescued.


While the stories in the book are (as everyone has said) sometimes depraved, they all aren't like that and the book ends on a beautifully optimistic note - though not everyone is going to think that way. Really, I can only think of two that made me want to stop reading, but I didn't - I pushed through. And I encourage anyone who is thinking of reading Haunted to do the same thing. You might just love it to death.