I think Chuck Palahniuk's career peaked before it started. Fight Club was fresh, brilliant, and surprising. He keeps trying different voices, and going for the surprising twist. In Damned, the voice is a precocious and pudgy 13-year-old girl, and the twists aren't all that surprising or compelling. Madison dies and goes to hell, but with her addiction to hope she refuses to give in to despair and sets out to make hell a better place. She even recruits people to join her via her telemarketing job. (That's right, those annoying "market research" calls you get at dinnertime come from condemned souls calling from a phone bank in hell.)
But Madison gets annoying. Her narration is sort of cute at times, but mostly she's an annoying teenager. Palahniuk's descriptions of hell started out a little clever, with his hills made up of fingernail and toenail clippings and waterfalls of poop, but that got old, too. The theology/demonology/soteriology is meant to be silly, of course, but it was almost too silly to be funny. Madison learns that people are condemned based on, for instance, how many times they say the f-word or how often they have peed in a hotel swimming pool.
As you might expect from Palahniuk, Damned is good for a few laughs, some entertaining social commentary, and some off-beat creativity. I kept hanging on, waiting to see what Palahniuk might do with the story, but frankly I was glad when this one was over and wished I'd headed for the exit sooner.
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