Damned
The first book I ever read by author Chuck Palahniuk was Fight Club so I had this feeling upon reading Damned that it was not going to stand up to this particular predecessor and rightly so because it didn’t.
Madison is the intelligent but overweight and bullied daughter of a wealthy Hollywood couple with a penchant for adopting kids from poor countries for the publicity. Left alone with her new foster brother in a hotel while her parents go to an awards night, she ends up in the netherworld because of a “game” taught to her at an exclusive Swiss boarding school. Madison ends up making some friends consisting of a rip-off of John Hughes Breakfast Club characters if they were serving detention in Hell. Every chapter also emulates Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret but pulling a switch a roo, all the questions are addressed to Satan. Not having asserted herself while she was alive, Madison reinvents a new life for herself and uses her telemarketing job to create a conduit between the living that are to be soon deceased. When Madison finally meets the prince of darkness she is told an unpalatable story about herself and it ends on a note that suggests a sequel.
The book is clever in its mockery of tropes and exploration of theology and mythology but felt haphazard with the storyline. I liked the initial premise of having these characters form an unlikely bond in the underworld but a twist in the plot made it feel irrelevant. What I got out of Damned was even if you do end up in Hell, death is not all that bad.