Haunted

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of them to be prec ise. Twenty-two of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stoma ch-churning tales you'll ever encounter - sometimes all at once. They are told by the people who have all answered the ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They 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. B ut 'here' turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theatre where the y are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and pow er and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And t he more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the sto ries they tell - and the more devious their machinations become to mak e themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbu ster that will certainly be made from their plight. Haunted is at one level a satire of reality television.It draws from a great literary tr adition - The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storyteller s in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein to tell an utterly contemporary