Novel: Haunted

Premise
A group of aspiring writers respond to a mysterious ad promising a secluded, distraction-free retreat where they can produce their masterpieces. Shepherded by the enigmatic impresario Mr. Whittier and his assistant Mrs. Clark, they are taken to an abandoned theater and sealed inside for three months with just enough provisions to survive. Each participant adopts a new persona, Comrade Snarky, Saint Gut-Free, Miss America, Reverend Godless, the Earl of Slander, and many more, supposedly to liberate their art from their former lives. The retreat is pitched as an escape from the world; it becomes a trap built to expose what each person will do for a story.

Structure and style
The novel is a frame narrative that stitches together the present-tense ordeal in the theater with a cycle of self-contained tales and brief poems, or “choruses,” attributed to the participants. Each story reveals the secret history behind a nickname and the moral rot under a crafted persona. The most infamous of these is “Guts,” a visceral confession from Saint Gut-Free, but every story pushes transgression and taboo. The choral poems punctuate the action with mordant refrains that crystallize group dynamics, giving the book the rhythm of a grotesque variety show.

Plot
Early on, the group realizes they are locked in and cut off. What begins as panic quickly shifts into opportunism. Sensing the value of a harrowing survivor narrative, the writers decide to manufacture a catastrophe that will guarantee them movie deals and book contracts once they are rescued. They sabotage heat and electricity, spoil food, and vandalize the set they inhabit so the eventual discovery will look dramatic. Injury becomes currency. Mutilation becomes authorship. Each participant ups the ante to appear more victimized than the rest.

Mr. Whittier presides like a sinister producer, doling out assignments and provocations, until a fatal turn, accident, misadventure, or murder, removes him from the stage. His death is concealed to preserve the mythology they are constructing. As weeks pass, hunger, cold, and paranoia deepen. Allegiances form and collapse. Characters vanish. Bodies accumulate. Acts of self-harm and violence blur into performance as the group competes to suffer most convincingly. Their private confessions in the interleaved stories reveal that each came hoping to control a narrative; inside the theater, the narrative controls them.

Characters and voices
The parade of aliases offers a chorus of American archetypes: a gossip merchant who feeds on scandal, a blogger who weaponizes outrage, a fallen beauty queen, a faithless preacher, a cop with a vendetta, a chef with a past. Through their stories, the book maps the distance between the brand each person markets and the damage they conceal. The nicknames become curses as secrets surface and the group turns on itself.

Themes and tone
Haunted is a splatter-satire of the hunger for fame and the commodification of suffering. It lampoons workshop culture, reality TV logic, and the belief that trauma guarantees authenticity. The theater becomes a petri dish where art, commerce, and cruelty fuse, and where the boundary between confession and exploitation erodes. The tone swings from deadpan comedy to body horror, using shock to strip away sentimentality and force a look at complicity, both the characters’ and the audience’s, in consuming sensational pain as entertainment.

Ending
As the ordeal reaches its breaking point and the prospect of discovery looms, the survivors double down on the fiction they have engineered, destroying evidence and editing reality to secure the perfect narrative arc. Rescue, when it comes, is less a salvation than a publishing opportunity. The final turn suggests that the most durable prison is the story they have chosen, and that the culture waiting outside will reward the spectacle over the truth.