ARE YOU THERE, SATAN? IT'S ME, MADISON: A review of DAMNED

That’s how every chapter of Chuck Palahniuk’s new masterpiece begins. Madison, more commonly known as Maddy, is the fat thirteen-year-old daughter of two Hollywood bigwigs, but due to an overdose of marijuana (at least, that’s the story at first), she is now dead. She wakes up in a dingy cage in Hell, where the currency is candy and all of the sperm, shit, and fingernail clippings from earth drain off to form awful "natural" bodies.



The cover copy describes this book as Dante’s INFERNO by way of THE BREAKFAST CLUB. True enough, except they forgot to add, “as written by Judy Blume.” The genius in DAMNED is Palahniuk’s depiction of Hell, from the Dandruff Desert to the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions.  It is just about the grossest place you can imagine. Even worse, when you get damned, you have to spend the rest of eternity doing one of two things: either you do Internet porn forever or you become a telemarketer who calls the living solely when they’re having dinner.


Not to say Palahniuk has nothing to offer about the land of the living. In flashbacks, we learn about Maddy’s life of privilege, about her “former beatniks, former hippies, former Rastas, former anarchists” parents, everything from how her mom likes to fuck with the maids in their homes across the world by locking them into bathrooms via remote access to how her dad insists on living a nudist lifestyle in order to make sure she doesn’t grow up to become a pervert. A reader must wonder, is this the way Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie live their lives?


The novel isn’t without its flaws. For instance, for a book about the afterlife, an awful lot of it is about Maddy when she was alive. When she was abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas break (not that her parents would ever celebrate Christmas). When she tried seducing her adopted brother, Goran. When she learned about a horrible thing called the French kissing game. It’s all very interesting stuff, but most of a novel shouldn’t be told in flashback. (Pay attention, Anne Rice.)


Also, the beginning of the book is kind of hard to get through. There’s a lot of rambling from Maddy with very little actually going on in the story. It picks up after the first few chapters, but that’s no way to start a novel, no matter how brief the chapters may be. Readers unfamiliar with Palahniuk’s work might not slog through it to get to the good stuff.


And lastly, when things finally start happening, big things (like Maddy facing off against Hitler, Caligula, and other historic figures, including Baal), tend to get skimmed over, almost as if they’re incidental.


In anyone else’s hands, DAMNED would have failed. But Palahniuk knows what he’s doing, and he pulls it off with flair and style. The scene where Maddy and her punk friend, Archer, face off against the demon, Psezpolnica, is worth the price of admission alone.


DAMNED
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: Doubleday
247 pages
$24.95