Book #91: Damned

Book #91: Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

June 11, 2014


At long last, it is the eve of the last day of school. I'll officially be on summer vacation in two days, though I will still be focused on my comps and finishing up my master's degree, but I'll have that done by the end of the month. Then I can really enjoy my summer, for the first time in a while.

Palahniuk is one great author for summer reading, if you like what I would call his "light-hearted darkness." He makes light of disgusting aspects of reality, like racism and hypocrisy and pedophilia, and the thirteen-year-old narrator is so flip. Some might find it offensive, but Palahniuk just does what many other great writers have done, and holds a magnifying glass up to the worst parts of our society, of ourselves.

I'm making the book sound so profound, but it's really not. It's a fun read. Maddy Spencer is thirteen and is dead, and sent to Hell. The Hell in this book is absurd; nasty candy litters the ground, and good candy is currency. The landscape is composed of the nastiest things produced by the human body: oceans of sperm, rivers of bile, deserts of dandruff, swamps of aborted babies (it's specifically called the swamp of Partial-Birth Abortions)...and cockroaches are everywhere. Now, Maddy had been the daughter of a film producer and an actress, overweight and subjected to her parents' charitable publicity stunts and Hollywood lifestyle. She's chubby, insecure, precocious, and eager to please. She first believes that she died of a marijuana overdose, but since that obviously can't be true, the truth is eventually revealed.

Maddy thrives in Hell. She makes friends with other young souls, and they form a sort of self-described "undead Breakfast Club," with her as the Ally Sheedy character, of course. Her friends help her navigate her way through hell, and she actually comes to like it there. In her job as a telemarketer (in Palahniuk's hell, it's either that or Internet porn for making an income of candy), she encourages dying people over the phone to go to Hell, and when they arrive, they gravitate to her. Maddy, once a sharp-witted but shy girl, becomes a leader of her own Hellish army. With the encouragement of punk Archer, she beats up various historical villains, like Hitler and Vlad the impaler. She's now a bad ass; being dead and in Hell gave her the confidence to shape her own destiny.

Briefly on how she died: Maddy had an adopted brother named Goran. In fact she had a lot of adopted siblings, all trotted out in front of the media before being sent to a nice boarding school. Goran was the newest, not yet cast off, but he's too surly and "ungrateful" to please Maddy's parents. Maddy is in love with him. I had a feeling that Goran killed Maddy, but that turns out to be something of a "comedy of errors" (though it's not really a comedy because a kid dies). Actually, they both do; Goran gets shanked in juvie and joins Maddy in Hell, and they reconcile. That is twisted and sweet, just right for this book.

Each chapter begins with Maddy addressing Satan, in a twist on Judy Blume. Maddy comes face to face with Satan near the end of the book, before she and her friends go to haunt earth for Halloween. She becomes determined to destroy him, and is convinced that he is intimidated by her. She goes to earth and she and Archer visit his and his sister's gravesite. She then goes and fucks with three girls at her old school, who are somewhat responsible for her death themselves. The book ends with her preparing to return to Hell and take on Satan once and for all.

This book is the first of a trilogy; the second volume, Doomed, was published last year. I definitely plan to continue reading about the adventures of Maddy Spencer's soul. I enjoy Palahniuk's fucked up world (and underworld). Look, our world is just as messed up for real, but rather than hide from it, his books help me laugh about it. Better to laugh than cry, I always say.