Characters
The following are the 19 characters in the main narrative, along with the stories they tell:
| Character | Story | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Brandon Whittier | Dog Years | A wheelchair-bound rich man who owns the abandoned theatre and hosts the writers' retreat. Though he appears to be a very old man, he is in fact a thirteen-year-old boy who suffers from progeria. He amassed his wealth by convincing middle-aged married women to sleep with him by telling them that he was an eighteen-year-old virgin, then blackmailing them into giving him money in exchange for silence. |
| Obsolete | ||
| Tess Clark | Post-Production | A housewife turned failed amateur porn actress who has become Whittier's assistant to learn what happened to her daughter Cassandra at Whittier's last writer's retreat. |
| The Nightmare Box | ||
| Poster Child | ||
| Cassandra | ||
| Saint Gut-Free | Guts | An abnormally skinny man who lost part of his lower intestine in a masturbation accident. |
| Mother Nature | Foot Work | A reflexologist and homeopathic therapy expert who was once employed in prostitution based around her skills with reflexology. She has joined the retreat to escape the Russian Mafia, after becoming an accessory to the murder of her friend's pimp. |
| Miss America | Green Room | A pregnant model who wants to become famous by promoting an exercise device on daytime television. |
| Lady Baglady (Evelyn Keyes) | Slumming | An old money woman who, along with her husband, used to pretend to be homeless as a cure for boredom. After she and her husband witness a crime leading to the murder of a wealthy Brazilian heiress, her husband is murdered by the killers, and a string of homeless people are murdered in the search for her. She comes to the retreat to escape the people who want to kill her. |
| The Earl of Slander | Swan Song | A reporter who murders a former child star to frame him for collecting child pornography, so that he can write a Pulitzer Prize-winning article about it. |
| The Duke of Vandals (Terry Fletcher) | Ambition | An amateur artist who sneaks paintings into museums. He later becomes a respected professional when he murders a famous artist as a favor to the man's patron. He has come to the retreat to escape the same fate as the other artist. |
| Director Denial | Exodus | A social worker at a police station. She brings with her a cat named Cora Reynolds, named after its former owner, a co-worker who killed herself trying to stop police officers from using anatomically correct dolls for sexual purposes. |
| Reverend Godless | Punch Drunk | A former soldier who, with a group of other soldiers, raises money by lip-syncing in drag and allowing people to assault him to fund a war on religion. |
| The Matchmaker | Ritual | A man who dresses similar to a cowboy. He convinced his wife to marry him after hiring a male prostitute to ruin her idea of the perfect man. Rather than being autobiographical, his story is an extended "joke" he learned from his uncles, which is in fact an anecdote about a freak accident in a Nazi POW camp that saved their lives. |
| Sister Vigilante | Civil Twilight | A religious woman who carries a bowling ball with which she might or might not have killed people. |
| Chef Assassin (Richard Talbott) | Product Placement | A professional chef who murders critics who write negative reviews of his cooking and blackmails knife manufacturers by threatening to tell the world that he uses only their knives to commit his deeds. |
| Comrade Snarky | Speaking Bitterness | A woman who is critical of other women's looks. When she was a child her parents divorced and her mother continually warned her that her father might sexually abuse her. This, however, never occurred but because of it she has been wary and critical of men for her entire life. She came to the writers' retreat after she and the members of a women's retreat sexually assaulted an individual who may or may not have been a post-operative male-to-female transgendered person on account of their having been born male. |
| Agent Tattletale (Eugene Denton) | Crippled | A man who becomes temporarily crippled and tries to cheat the company he worked for out of worker's compensation after he recovers. After killing a man who was collecting evidence on him for the company, he takes that man's job and is almost killed by a woman on whom he spied. |
| The Missing Link | Dissertation | A member of the Chewlah, a tribe of people who are, according to local rumor, able to transform into sasquatches. |
| The Countess Foresight (Claire Upton) | Something's Got to Give | A woman with psychic powers. She was arrested for murdering the owner of an antique shop, who would not let her touch (and therefore receive psychic visions from) the unborn child of Marilyn Monroe located in a milky jar of fluid, whom she also believes was Marilyn Monroe's murderer. She now wears an electronic tracking bracelet as part of the terms of her parole. |
| The Baroness Frostbite (Miss Leroy) | Hot Potting | A former employee of the White River Lodge who lost her lips to frostbite while trying to save someone from an accident at the hot springs nearby. |
| Miss Sneezy (Lisa Noonan) | Evil Spirits | A woman with chronic sinus problems. She claims to carry an incurable disease, and that she escaped from a government isolation facility. |
Read more about this topic: Haunted (Palahniuk Novel)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to come out first in the happy ending of moral uplift.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“His leanings were strictly lyrical, descriptions of nature and emotions came to him with surprising facility, but on the other hand he had a lot of trouble with routine items, such as, for instance, the opening and closing of doors, or shaking hands when there were numerous characters in a room, and one person or two persons saluted many people.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets
All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)