The synopsis on the dustjacket describes Haunted as a satire of reality television, but according to Palahniuk, the novel is actually about "the battle for credibility" that has resulted from the ease with which one can publish through the use of modern technology.

In the meantime, they will have enough food and water to survive, as well as heat, electricity, bedrooms, bathrooms, and a clothes washing and drying machine provided.

Since the characters are not coordinating their plans, they end up destroying all their food and utilities, forcing all of them to struggle to survive starvation, cold, and darkness.

With numerous people dead, Mrs. Clark included, the writers continue to sabotage themselves, such as destroying the lighting and wasting any additional food supplies they find.

Informing the writers their three months have passed and that they are free to leave, Whittier notes that, by continuing to blame him for everything and playing the victim to extreme extents, they haven't acted any differently from the other groups.

In the first story, an adolescent boy inserts a Vaseline-lubricated carrot into his rectum to stimulate his prostate, then, in haste, stashes it in a pile of laundry when he is called to dinner.

Next, the narrator tells the tale of a young boy who, having heard that it enhances masturbatory pleasure, inserts a thin stick of candle wax into his urethra.

The wax unexpectedly slips back into the boy's bladder, thereby blocking his urine flow and causing blood to seep from his penis.

Finally, the narrator explains how he himself suffered a sexual injury, when sitting on the water-intake valve at the bottom of his home swimming pool while masturbating.

While swimming down to the bottom of the pool to stimulate his prostate before coming up for air—a repetitive process he refers to as "pearl diving"—the suction from the valve causes his rectum and lower intestines to prolapse and become tangled in the filter.

Haunted received a negative review from The New York Times columnist Tom Shone who noted that despite being referred to as a horror novel it is "stubbornly unscary.

It burps up its shock moments with so little ceremony that the Gothic virtue of stealthily sidewinding suspense – the art of allowing a story to steal up on you before you even knew it was there – is left whistling in the wind.