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.
Source: Goodreads
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.
