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Damned: Life is Short, Death is Forever / Chuck Palahniuk

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It’s pretty damn easy to get to Hell. If you exceed 700 mutterings of the F-word, for example, you’re damned for eternity. If you honk your horn just one time over your lifetime allowance of 500, you’re damned (probably less in Switzerland). If you exceed your charitable allowance of urinating in a public swimming pool, you’re damned. Not to mention the obvious ways to get in— murder, suicide, genocide.

Maddie is a thirteen-year-old girl (daughter of a Hollywood power couple that sounds an awful lot like Brangelina), who finds herself the newest resident “downunder,” and she’s not completely sure why. She decides to make the best of things though. Her backstory is revealed little by little, as she and her cohorts (who are a Hellish version of the Breakfast Club) plod their way across the Dandruff Desert and a wasteland made up of toenail clippings (just some of the topographic treats waiting for you in Hell). By the end of the story Maddie has the diabolical job of telemarketer, calling people just as they sit down to dinner and convincing a few to join her in her eternal damnation (the computerized autodialer in Hell makes it a top priority to call mostly numbers on the federal government’s No Call List).

There are some real laughs in Damned. It’s satirical and it's irreverant and it reminded me of an off-beat novel I read several years ago by Percival Everett, American Desert. The one criticism I have with Damned is that the laughs started wearing thin after the first hundred or so pages. It might have been a better short story or novella. Nevetheless, it is original and rather entertaining and if you're looking for something a little different, this might fit the bill. I’ve included some excerpts below that might whet your appetite for this oddball novel:

Anyone who’s ever flown London to Sydney, seated next to or anywhere in the proximity of a fussy baby, you’ll no doubt fall right into the swing of things in Hell. What with the strangers and crowding and seemingly endless hours of waiting for nothing to happen, for you Hell will feel like one long, nostalgic hit of déjà vu. Especially if your in-flight movie was The English Patient. p 9.

In regard to the smell, Hell comes nowhere near as bad as Naples in the summertime during a garbage strike. p 9.

As it turns out, the way-fundamentalist Christian creationists were correct. How I wish I could tell my parents: Everybody in Kansas was right. Yes, the inbred snake handlers and holy rollers had more on the ball than my secular humanist, billionaire mom and dad. The dark forces of evil really did plant those dinosaur bones and fake fossil records to mislead mankind. Evolution was hokum, and we fell for it hook, line, and sinker. p 82.

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