Haunted

The Guts Effect

CultAdmin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:15:54 -0500

by Chuck Palahniuk

Included with Advanced Readers Copies
Sent out with the UK edition of 'Haunted'

No one fainted the first time I read the short story, 'Guts'. This was on a Tuesday night, in the writers workshop where my friends and I have shared our work since 1991. Each week, I would read another of the short stories I planned to include in a novel to be called Haunted. My goal was to create horror around very ordinary things: carrots, candles, swimming pools. Microwave popcorn. Bowling balls.

No one fainted, in fact my friends laughed. At moments, the room had the silence of total shocked attention. No one scribbled helpful notes in the margin of their copy. No one reached for their glass of wine.

Guts

CultAdmin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:23:53 -0500

By Chuck Palahniuk
(from the collection Haunted)

Inhale.

Take in as much air as you can.

This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.

A friend of mine, when he was thirteen years old he heard about "pegging." This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac. He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket checkstand, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned.

Haunted

CultAdmin — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 23:19:02 -0500

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Artists' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months" and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But "here" turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply.

Real Life 'Guts' Story?

Dennis — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 15:13:34 -0400

From WCCO.com

Girl Seriously Injured After Sitting On Pool Drain

(AP) Minneapolis A 6-year-old Edina, Minn. girl is hospitalized after a horrific accident at a swimming pool.

Abigail Taylor was severely injured Tuesday when she sat over an open drain hole in a wading pool at the Minneapolis Golf Club. According to a posting by her family on the Caring Bridge Web site, the drain's powerful suction tore out part of her intestinal tract.

The family's account says it's a, quote, "medical miracle" that she's still alive. The online account was taken down late yesterday.

Read The Rest Of The Story Here

*Thanks to Alicia on MySpace for the scoop!

Haunted

The Guts Effect

by Chuck Palahniuk

Guts

By Chuck Palahniuk (from the collection Haunted)

Haunted

Real Life 'Guts' Story?

By Chuck Palahniuk
(from the collection Haunted)