This episode is also on Bilibili too.
The short story Haunted that made so many people faint is one of the stories in the full-length book Haunted. In fact, the book has more than twenty other stories standing alongside it. Some are about strange happenings, some about conspiracy theories, and some about surreal urban legends. The subjects are all over the place, but they all carry a powerful taste of terror and the bizarre. Together, these stories make up this mad, twisted cult classic.
I’ll first try to sort out the novel’s overall framework, then pick a few memorable short stories to talk about—including, of course, the jaw-dropping short story Haunted. And while I’m telling the stories, I’ll also take the chance to share some of my own understanding and thoughts about the book.
The structure of Haunted is a long story containing dozens of short stories.
The Writers’ Retreat
The long story in Haunted is about a group of men and women lured by an ad for a “Writers’ Retreat” to a mansion cut off from the outside world. There, they’re supposed to sever all outside contact, live for three months in isolation, and create a literary masterpiece with nothing to distract them.
A dozen or more people join the “Writers’ Retreat,” men and women from wildly different backgrounds. Almost none of them use their real names; instead, they all have nicknames: Mother Nature, the Fag Hag, the Denial Inspector, the Killer Chef, the Countess of Clairvoyance, and so on. They don’t exactly look normal, either. The Baroness of Frostbite has no lips, the Gossip Detective always carries a video camera, and the Saint Gutless is so thin he looks like a walking skeleton…
Not long after arriving at the retreat, this bunch gets a wicked idea. They figure the things humans love watching most are nothing more than suffering packed with drama: war, famine, crime, massacre…
—So why should we bother putting any effort into writing good stories or good novels? All we have to do during these three months is create some truly outrageous suffering on our own bodies. Then these horrifying experiences we’ve personally lived through will become the best story material in the world. Once we get out, we can just lie around collecting royalties. As long as our suffering is outrageous enough, we’ll become legends in the eyes of every storyteller on earth.
And so the students of the “Writers’ Retreat” gradually descend into madness. To manufacture suffering, they destroy the ample food supply, then, unable to endure the hunger, start eating things that would get this episode banned before it could pass review. That makes them feel they’ve sunk into even deeper suffering, so they double down on the self-dramatization. They assign themselves all kinds of roles in the suffering: some play star-crossed lovers, some demons, some heroes, enriching the layers of misery. They become hopelessly addicted to playing their parts. Then they mutilate their own bodies to manufacture suffering, and kill one another for the same reason… In the end, the “Writers’ Retreat” draws to a close amid the bloody stench of severed limbs and the foul reek of rotting corpses…
This long story running through Haunted from beginning to end is about these people gradually becoming possessed by their own madness. The novel’s original English title is Haunted, which carries the sense of being haunted by ghosts. But I think the most fitting translation is really “possessed.”
From my summary, you may think this story sounds wildly unrealistic—surely no one could get this crazy, no matter how crazy they were. But the writing in this novel is intensely impressionistic. It isn’t the kind of realist fiction where the author carefully explains every cause and effect. Chuck Palahniuk’s words hit the page like bullets: bang, bang, bang. Tons of short sentences, no drag or padding; with a few phrases, he can build a precise image and deliver an idea with pinpoint accuracy. This kind of prose pulls you straight into the atmosphere the author has created. So when you read the story of the “Writers’ Retreat,” it doesn’t feel like watching a TV series with a beginning and an end. It feels like walking into a theater, where a beam of light suddenly illuminates the stage and you find this pack of lunatics already beginning their insane performance. Their state of madness makes no sense at all in real life, yet onstage it is perfectly self-consistent.
As they gradually become possessed, the students of the “Writers’ Retreat” begin telling the stories of what happened to them before they came there. These dozens of stories, contained within the long story I just described, make up the other half of the novel.
Haunted
The first to step up and tell a story is the emaciated Saint Gutless, and the story he throws out is the famous Haunted. A royal flush right out of the gate.
Haunted is only a few thousand words long. The plot is actually extremely simple—so simple you could say it’s just one image. Here’s what happens: a boy reaches puberty, his hormones go through the roof, and he becomes desperate for sex and for ways to get sexual pleasure, if you know what I mean. Teenage boys often get the urge to experiment with bizarre ways of masturbating. Every man reading this has to be nodding silently by now: you all had some wild fantasies in that department back then, and probably tried a few wild things too. The protagonist of Haunted, Saint Gutless, discovered a mind-blowingly pleasurable method during puberty—he would dive to the bottom of his family pool, hold his breath, and masturbate. But that wasn’t all. He said, “The best part was the pool’s filter and circulation pump intake.” Naked, he sat his butt on the circulation-pump opening and enjoyed the sensation of being sucked.
But that time, after he finished enjoying himself and prepared to rise for a breath of fresh air, something went wrong: he couldn’t get back up. He must have been positioned with uncanny precision, because the pump opening had completely sucked onto his butt. But he certainly didn’t want to suffocate, so a burst of brute force rose from his gut. He kicked with both feet and actually floated upward for a stretch. Before he reached the surface, though, he realized something seemed to be holding him back. He hung suspended in the middle of the pool, unable to rise any farther. He looked back. What did he see? Brace yourself. The next passage is from the original:
Bright points of light kept flashing before my eyes. I turned my head to look behind me… but it made no sense at all. The thick rope, like some kind of snake, bluish-white, with veins visible on its surface, came up from the drain and clamped its teeth around my ass. Some of the veins were leaking blood. The red blood looked black at the bottom of the pool, drifting out through tiny cracks in the snake’s pale skin and disappearing into the water. Through that snake’s thin bluish-white skin, I could still see clumps of half-digested food.
It was the only thing that made sense. Some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something never seen in broad daylight, had been hiding in the darkness deep inside the pool drain, waiting to bite me.
……
You could see corn and peanuts tangled inside the snake’s belly. You could also see a long, bright orange ball, like one of those giant vitamin pills my dad forced me to eat so I’d gain weight and win a football scholarship. It had iron and omega-3 fatty acids added.
Seeing that vitamin pill was what saved my life.
It wasn’t a snake. It was my large intestine. My guts had been pulled out of my body. This was what doctors called a “prolapse.” My intestines had been sucked into the drain.
After Palahniuk finished writing Haunted, he toured many places around the world and read the story aloud in public. Supposedly, more than a hundred people fainted on the spot in total. I’m guessing you understand why after reading that passage. The whole novel is packed with descriptions as explosively vivid as this one.
So what was the protagonist, trapped underwater in the novel, supposed to do? If he didn’t swim up soon, he would drown. The novel continues like this:
You’ve heard those stories about trapped animals biting off their own legs. Any old coyote will tell you that biting through a few times is better than dying. …You have to twist around, hook one hand behind your knee, and pull that leg up to your face. Then you have to find a way to bite down on your own ass. When you can’t breathe, you’ll bite anything for one more breath.
This is the kind of thing you don’t tell a girl on your first date. You don’t mention it if you want her to kiss you good night.
If I told you what it tasted like, you would never eat squid again. Ever.
And so the little boy bit down, rose to the surface, and later managed to survive surgery by sheer luck. But only a few inches of intestine remained, and he became Saint Gutless. The name Saint Gutless was both a nickname and a fact. He spent the rest of his life unable to digest food properly and malnourished, which is why he was skin and bones, shaped like a skeleton.
That is Saint Gutless’s story.
The story Haunted made so many people faint mainly because of Palahniuk’s intensely visceral description of the image of the intestines being pulled out of the body. But beyond that direct sensory shock, the story hides another layer of horror: this accident, bizarre as it looks at first glance, is actually not far removed from reality.
As I mentioned earlier, every man who has passed puberty will smile knowingly at the beginning of the story and remember the crazy experiments he tried back then. So when he finishes reading it, his asshole really does clench. He realizes that if just one of those experiments had gone a tiny bit wrong, he might have ended up joining Saint Gutless for mutual warmth.
That is the second layer of horror in Haunted: it makes people—men, at least—feel with startling force that “the abyss is within arm’s reach.” It makes us realize that the wicked thought, evil impulse, or bad idea that once flashed through our minds might, with just a little more excess, send us sliding into an abyss with no way back. After other horror novels, you may feel shaken but safe. After Haunted, what you’re likely to feel is dread in retrospect—the sudden realization that the abyss was once right within reach of your own hand.
Most of the other stories in this book are actually cut from the same cloth as Haunted: someone in the story has a dark thought, an evil thought, or comes up with a crooked idea, and then somebody ends up paying dearly for it. These stories may also strike a chord deep inside some readers. They may not all leave you with the same lingering dread as Haunted, but they may remind you just the same that filthy, dark things are lurking somewhere within reach of a single thought.
For example, let’s take a look at another story brought by a fellow member of The Writers’ Retreat, the Lady of the Streets: “Slumming It”—
“Slumming It”
Lately, the news has been full of socialites with every imaginable gimmick: Buddhist socialites, sick-note socialites, vegetable socialites, toddler socialites… It’s like the demons have been let loose. The Lady of the Streets’ story is about an even stranger kind of socialite—the slumming socialite.
The Lady of the Streets used to be a billionaire heiress who moved among charity auctions and top-tier celebrity parties. One day, she happened to discover that a disheveled homeless woman on the roadside was actually a major socialite from their wealthy circle. Later, after asking around, she learned what had happened. It turned out this celebrity had grown tired of the rich-lady lifestyle. She said:
Rich people who fly around in private jets were the first homeless nomads. … We may own a dozen houses—or more—each in a different city—but we still live out of a single suitcase.
If the lives of the ultra-rich are essentially no different from those of the homeless on the street, why not just tear through that thin veil and become homeless for real? The socialite had one killer line after another. She said:
New wealth is poverty. New fame is being a nobody.
She said:
The whole champagne-and-caviar lifestyle lost its appeal ages ago. When a private jet can get you from here to Rome in six hours, escape becomes far too easy. The world feels tiny and boring.
…In this boring new world where everyone belongs to the upper middle class, nothing is more satisfying than spending a few hours spying on the street.
She said:
Crazy is the new rational. Dressing in rags is the new formalwear.
And so, under the spell of this celebrity socialite, a group of ultra-rich people became so-called “commuter drifters.” They checked into luxury suites at top hotels, changed into filthy, stinking rags, and sneaked out to play homeless for a night. The next day, they turned back into the top-flight rich people they were.
But just as these “slumming socialites” were so swept up in their game of pretending to be poor that they could hardly stop congratulating themselves, they happened to witness a contract killing. A girl was murdered right in front of them by someone who looked like a hitman. They happened to know the victim: she was the daughter of a South American oil tycoon. It was obviously a contract killing. To eliminate loose ends and silence the witnesses, the mastermind behind the hit put out a gangland kill order and began hunting down the homeless in the city. By the time this bunch of “slumming socialites” came to their senses, it was already too late to run. For the first time, they truly experienced the terror of being homeless—having no one and nothing to rely on, with their lives in danger at any moment…
“Product Status”
Some people, like the Lady of the Streets, bring a crooked idea down on their own heads and wind up facing death. Others use crooked ideas to make everyone else’s lives fall apart, like the story “Product Status” brought by the Killer Chef. What he brought was a letter he wrote to the public-relations manager of the “Universal” Knife Company.
At the beginning of the letter, the Killer Chef reveals that he is the culprit behind the recent serial murders of food critics. The Killer Chef wasn’t originally a “killer” at all, just a “chef.” But after he could no longer stand the bad reviews from food critics online and in the newspapers, he developed a taste for murder and became a serial killer who specialized in hunting food critics. So why was he writing to a knife brand?
The Killer Chef wrote:
Killing a rabbit and killing some weirdo who says on a blog that your fennel pork chop needs more Italian Marsala white wine are barely different. Thanks to Universal Knife Company’s knives. The turning knives you make work beautifully for both jobs…
The Killer Chef went on:
However careful I am, it’s only a matter of time before the police catch me. The one thing I’m afraid of is that Universal Knife Company’s knives will become associated, in the minds of ordinary people, with a whole string of things they might misunderstand.
The details of how I handled each target, including the knives I used, are still vividly preserved in my mind. The police probably won’t have to work too hard to make me confess, and it will all become part of the public record… From then on, ordinary people will talk about the “Universal Knife murders” or the “Universal Knife serial killings.”
All it would take is a small investment to make you and me both very happy. … A mere five million dollars would let me emigrate, disappear under an assumed name, and live somewhere far beyond your company’s market plans.
Or, if you can only manage one million, I’ll switch to Yongli knives. If I’m ever caught, I’ll swear that I used their substandard products from beginning to end… One million dollars—isn’t that about what product loyalty is worth?
In this world, far too few people are willing to spend their whole lives keeping a product consistently high-quality. I salute you.
Always your product’s number-one fan,
Richard Talbot
The story ends with the signature at the bottom of this letter.
“Scrapped”
Now let’s look at another somewhat unusual story in the book, “Scrapped.” It is the only story in the entire book completely unrelated to the experiences of the people at The Writers’ Retreat, and it is pure surrealism. The story was brought by the organizer of The Writers’ Retreat—an old man named Mr. Weitir.
I happened to be watching Season 3 of Love, Death & Robots while writing this answer, and I thought this story had the same flavor as Love, Death & Robots: wildly imaginative and pitch-black. It goes like this:
During humanity’s first crewed mission to Venus, people discovered that the heaven they had yearned for through the ages was not somewhere else—it was right there on Venus. Venus was the paradise to which human souls were supposed to travel in the legends of various religions. As it turned out, human souls kept reincarnating on Earth until they completed their spiritual cultivation and reached a certain standard. Then the cycle ended, and the soul finally landed on Venus to gain eternal life. There was eternal happiness there. The book says, “That is heaven, and there is sex and strong drink there,” and, “In that world, the Ten Commandments are: party, party, party.”
Humanity soon discovered that more than a million souls had already escaped the cycle of reincarnation on Venus. Many famous people, great figures, and great philanthropists from history had already settled there. The people left on Earth panicked: how many more times would they have to reincarnate before they could go to Venus?
So the human government had a dark thought. They reasoned that if humanity stopped reproducing altogether and went collectively extinct in this generation, no new souls would reincarnate on Earth, and humanity could collectively ascend to heaven in one go. Humanity launched a massive emigration plan—the quotation marks around “emigration” matter, because it was really suicide. Supermarkets began legally selling highly toxic cyanide, while TV shopping channels started offering all kinds of “emigration packages.”
Many people bought cyanide at the supermarket and “emigrated” in their cars in the parking lot. More and more people ended their lives through various “emigration packages.”
But “if even one fertile couple were left behind, having a child would call one soul back,” and then “because of this tiny handful of people, the whole thing would have to start over again.”
So the people who resisted suicide became public enemies, and women of childbearing age became the public enemies among public enemies. Some people formed so-called “emigration assistance squads” to force people to “emigrate,” especially women of childbearing age. They would make one person “emigrate” for every person they found.
The story finally focuses on a family preparing to “emigrate” together. It is a family of four: a father, his two children, and their stepmother, all locked in a car together to “emigrate” by carbon monoxide poisoning. Partway through, the daughter, Eva, makes an excuse to leave. From a distance, she watches her family complete their “emigration.”
At that moment, Eva’s boyfriend, Adam, finds her. Adam says:
Did you tell them we’re having a baby? If we can make the whole human race start over, our parents are going to be furious…
Eva looks at the morning star near the horizon—which is Venus—and says:
If I have this baby, I hope she’ll be… Tracy.
Who is Tracy? Tracy is Eva’s stepmother.
And that is where the novel ends, with a sudden stop.
There’s a saying: “One thought leads to heaven, another to hell.” Whether a person’s fate turns out happy or tragic is sometimes decided by a single thought. But in the stories in Haunted, there is only “one thought leads to hell”: one flash of a dark thought, and the gates of hell open. Just like in the story above, even if heaven really existed, people could still miss it because of some chaotic, filthy dark thought.
Humanity was dragged into the abyss by its own dark thoughts—I think that’s one way to understand the stories in Haunted. But these stories are actually rich in meaning, and there are many different ways to read them. This is just my own angle for reference.
“The Nightmare Box”
Actually, the story in Haunted that I find most haunting has almost nothing to do with “the dark thoughts in the human heart.” Even now, I can’t say what the story really means. But as soon as I finished reading it, it lodged itself in my brain, leaving behind a strange, indescribable aftertaste that I couldn’t shake for a long time.
The story is called “The Nightmare Box.” A high-school girl named Cassandra goes to a gallery to see an exhibition. Among the exhibits is a box that looks like one of the oldest cameras from a hundred years ago. A tiny plaque on it reads “The Nightmare Box.” Like an old-fashioned camera, the box is mounted on a tripod. It constantly makes a ticking sound like a clock. The gallery owner says no one knows when the ticking will stop, but once it does, people can press their eyes to a peephole in the box and look inside. If they press the button on the box at that moment, a flash will go off inside. As for what they’ll see next, the owner has no idea. He acquired the box from the antique shop across the street after it closed down, and learned the legend when he bought the relic.
Just then, the ticking inside the box stops. Cassandra’s curiosity gets the better of her, and she looks through the peephole. A flash cuts across the room. No one knows what Cassandra saw. The book puts it this way:
She took two steps back and shook her head. Without looking up at anyone, Cassandra stared around at the floor, at those people’s feet, her mouth clamped tightly shut.
She took off her high heels and stood barefoot on the gallery floor. The muscles in both her legs had disappeared.
Loose hair hung over her face like a mask.
From then on, she no longer had any emotional ups and downs. It was as if she had lost interest in everything, and reacted to any stimulus from the outside world only sporadically, and barely at that. And no matter how insistently her mother questioned her, she would not say what she had seen inside the Nightmare Box.
Two days later, Cassandra cut off her eyelashes. She opened a suitcase, set it at the foot of the bed, and started putting lots of things into it, then taking them back out. Over and over. A few days later, she disappeared.
Cassandra’s mother began investigating the origins of the “Nightmare Box.” First she tracked down the antique shop, which had already gone out of business, and discovered that the shopkeeper’s grandson had also fallen into exactly the same state as Cassandra after looking at what was inside the “Nightmare Box.” Finally, Cassandra’s mother returned to the gallery, only to discover that the gallery owner had ended up the same way. It turned out that curiosity had gotten the better of him, too, and he had taken a look inside the Nightmare Box.
Fortunately, the gallery owner was still willing to say something. How did he describe what he had seen inside the “Nightmare Box”?
He said that one weekend, he had to go to a park for a picnic with former colleagues from a company where he used to work. It was a job he hated. As a practical joke, he brought no food, but did bring a large basket filled with trained pigeons. When all the small talk was over, the gallery owner said it was time to open the basket. The pigeons flew out—
Those people… In that swirl of white confusion, in the storm that erupted from the picnic center, some screamed, while others fell backward onto the grass.
The book goes on to say:
At the moment everyone realized this would not hurt them, when they discovered that everything was safe, it was the most beautiful sight they had ever seen. They shrank back, too astonished even to laugh. In that seemingly endless, elongated moment, they forgot everything that mattered and watched only as that flock of white wings flew into the blue sky.
They watched the flock circle, then scatter. And the pigeons, trained again and again, each followed its own path to the place it always knew was its true home.
The gallery owner said, “That was the scene inside the ‘Nightmare Box.’”
He said,
It was something beyond death and reincarnation. What was in the box was not what we call life. Our world is a dream. Infinitely false. A nightmare.
Just one look… and your life—your efforts, struggles, and worries—everything becomes meaningless. …It is all an illusion.
The gallery owner concluded:
What you saw inside the box was reality itself.
Written by: Zhichao Wei
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