At B & N Reads Somers tagged five books that work equally well as both novels and story collections, including:Haunted, by Chuck PalahniukRead about the other entries on the list.
Palahniuk, as always, doesn’t approach anything straightforwardly. The story of desperate (and, naturally, weird) aspiring authors who lock themselves into an old theater for the ultimate writer’s retreat is a double-subversion of a book: both a short novel punctuated by short stories that at first glance are independent of each other, and a larger narrative of increasingly insane writers. Dig deeper, however, and the stories refer back to the overall themes of the novel and provide much of the backstory normally handled in exposition in more traditional forms. In the end, if you separated the stories from the larger narrative they would both lose much of their power, which is your main clue that this is a hybrid book that’s more than the sum of its parts.
Haunted is among Jeff Somers's four huge books that will hurt your brain—but in a good way, Ginni Chen's top eight bone-chilling books to help beat the summer heat, and Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders's ten horror novels that are scarier than almost any movie.
--Marshal Zeringue