If Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ generated a record amount of hate-mail to the editors of The New Yorker, it is hard to imagine what readers would have done with Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Haunted, which even in a more blasé 2006 had a parental advisory sticker on it. It is a novel of stories, and one of the best known is ’Guts’, an in-novel story told by one of the characters, Saint Gut-Free. It is a horribly detailed account of the repellently disgusting way—involving using a swimming-pool in masturbatory experiments—by which he ended up with only six inches of large intestine. It is not exactly body-horror, but it is horrifying, the sort of story that is difficult to read because of the impulse to avert your eyes, the kind of nasty-minded story that makes you think twice about shaking the author’s hand. Apparently, when the author was promoting his work, people dropped like flies at readings of ’Guts’; after the ambulance left during one reading, Pahlaniuk’s agent called him to the edge of the stage and told him to stop.
The story is told in the first person by Saint Gut-Less himself, in a slangy, vibrant, vulgar style, that starts by offering an alternative (perhaps) to Poe’s measurement of a short story: “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.” Then he is off, a gonzo journalist of the sexual experiments of teenagers, unhesitatingly shining a light on practices “too low to even get a name”, things too “stupid, desperate” for even the French to have a name for them, culminating in his own invention, pearl-diving.
The awfulness of the story (so awful that, just when you think you’ve read the worst, he comes up for one last sucker-punch) is not a reason for including it in an anthology; I am not a fan of on-page blood-and-guts (sorry), or explicit horror, and do not seek out literature that causes a particular either physical or emotional reaction. There are two reasons for ’Guts’ being here: one is the sheer brio of the writing, and the other is the rebellious charm, still gleaming even in this queasy account, of those who truly have no damns left to give. Not every rebel, fictional or real, has this quality; too many are simply irresponsible, or over-entitled, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces. My enjoyment of the story is linked, in an attenuated way, to my enjoyment of noirHollywood: everyone seems to be knee-deep in a compromised and dirty world without the veneer of sophistication or the heart to observe polite social rituals. That ’Guts’ is as extreme as it is means (possibly ironically) that it is less truly horrifying than, say, James Ellroy, because it is also horribly funny.
First published in Haunted, ‘a novel of stories’, Doubleday, 2005
A Personal Anthology 