Skip to main content

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

By
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

By
The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Here we are / Graham Swift

By
This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

By
A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.
Post a Comment
Read more