Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted: A Novel of Stories.

I'm about halfway through this one. It's hard to say why I'm still reading this, since its premise is either stale or the sort of intentional self-parody that grows tiresome quickly. I'm not sure which it is. There is something persuasive about it on an intellectual level--this effort to develop characters who are aware of their own status as mere caricatures, who in fact strive to be nothing more that caricatures. More interesting than this story itself is the counterpoint it provides to the individual stories in the collection. These are sometimes monotonous, but they also tell some fantastic stories of people whose lives are so distorted that it's no wonder they're interested in erasing their lives in favor of a media narrative.

But frankly, I'm probably just reading at this point to find out how you top self-mutilation and cannibalism. Um, make that auto-cannibalism.

Experiment

I may be using this space as a sort of reading journal/log. Or, I might delete it next week. Probably its contents will be of interest mostly to me.