The end

I sort of agree. Short stories are cool, but they don't do it for me the way a novel does. The sustained effort of reading a novel makes the payoff much sweeter. I guess that what I mean is that the ending wasn't as good for me as the ending of a novel, but on the other hand I wouldn't say I was disappointed because I wasn't expecting as much.
Is there a word that means not quite disappointed, but only because my expectations were lowered?

I thought all of the stories would tie together more and more as the end neared and it would all make sense.

Yeah, I'm still a little puzzled over the ending myself. It just seemed too unresolved. And what gives with all that stuff about emigrating to Venus??? Where the hell did that come from? Still, I'll take a complex book with a slightly untidy ending over a neater but more conventional one anyday.

I thought Gutfree and Mother Nature ruined it for Whittier. He wanted them to go back into the world all fucked up and take Sneezy with him but they didn't let him.

As far as Chuck's work goes, the motive for the ending is not outright explained, nor do I think it's supposed to have reason. The theme of the book was how irrational people get over their problems. We will intentionally suffer through them, and no matter how effed up and ridiculous it seems for people to behave this way, it is what the human mind is not just capable of, but is likely to do. Especially with that sociological spin and competition. You can't have a 'finished' ending for this sort of story, the characters would just not allow that to happen.

I totally dug "Haunted", but maybe that's because I'd just finished Salinger's "Nine Stories". I'm also the kind of guy that thought the Soprano's finale was genius.

Anyway, let's call my explanation a theory, since I'm still digesting the novel, as it were:

Mr Whittier locked these aspiring writers in his own little 'nightmare box'; all he asked of them was to write. But too many of them simply wanted to be celebrated, sharing the only story they had, the one they'd lived...
...except for Miss Sneezy. The others might have invented their stories, but did little to suggest otherwise. Miss Sneezy, however, obviously created a fictional piece - otherwise, how did anybody live to three months? Miss Sneezy was, it seems, the only writer of the bunch.
That's why Mr Whittier offered his hand, and invited her outside; she's the only one that did what he asked of her. She's the only one that actually made stories. (Both of Mr Whittier's stories were fiction: "Obsolescene" was a psuedo-apocalyptic tale, and "Dog Years" was, despite the suggestion, not about Mr Whittier's first meeting with Miss Clark.)
And, (although she presumably ate some of the meat,) she did not instigate the demise of any of the other participants.

Don't ask me who the narrator was; assigning a narrator would declare one character 'the winner' of their challenge. Nobody won. The story belonged to all of them; the story ate all of them up.

[QUOTE=Giggan;974386]As far as Chuck's work goes, the motive for the ending is not outright explained, nor do I think it's supposed to have reason. The theme of the book was how irrational people get over their problems. We will intentionally suffer through them, and no matter how effed up and ridiculous it seems for people to behave this way, it is what the human mind is not just capable of, but is likely to do. Especially with that sociological spin and competition. You can't have a 'finished' ending for this sort of story, the characters would just not allow that to happen.[/QUOTE]

Exactly. And if I could take it one more step further, all (at least most) of his books are about ways humans try to escape their problems and how we will put our faith, hope and belief in anything if it means we can avoid facing them. Like Survivor they put their faith in famous public figures, invisible Monsters our faith was in our own beauty and shallowness. In Rant mankind were escaping their problems by boosting, they did not want to embrace life they only wanted to escape it. Haunted to me was all of this built into one, how irrational and hopeless we all are and that there are no extremes we will go to, to try and escape. There is not perfect ending for a novel of that magnitude, because there is actually no end for people who want to feel saved.

Leroy Grey!!!!

The Sapranos Finale Was Good, But The Ending Was Terrible. But If They Make A Movie That Will Be The Most Amazing Thing On This Planet.

As For Haunted, Its One Of My Favorites, And I Think The Ending Was Good, Especialy For A Book Of Short Stories.

I saw it as the characters became obsessed with their stories, obsessed with their pain, that the continuation of the torture would make them happier than going back into the real world. Like during a lot of the short stories Chuck seems to want to highlight even when things seemed bad, like Miss Sneezy's story of the girl with the Keegan cancer, it was better than the real world; emigration, better than the real world. It seems that in the end, they found their torture to be their story, and without it they would have no purpose.

So in the long run, their pain defined who they were, what stories they had.
And without it, they were lost.

Thats how I saw it at least.