Damned
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison'
Meet Madison, whip-tongued daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off adopting more orphans. Madison dies of a marijuana overdose and awakes to find herself in Hell, sharing her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that's almost too good to be true.
Welcome to the afterlife as only Palahniuk could imagine it - he makes eternal torment, well, simply divine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Move over, Dante, there's a new tour guide to hell: Madison Spencer, the 13-year-old narrator of Palahniuk's clich -ridden latest bulletin of phoned-in outrage. After self-asphyxiating, Madison wakes up in hell and quickly finds, as she's put to work prank-calling people at dinnertime, that her new home is not much different from Saturday detention in The Breakfast Club. Embarking on a field trip with some new friends, Madison fights demons, raises an army of the dead, and storms the gates of Satan's citadel. At the same time, she flashes back to her unhappy life as the daughter of a self-absorbed movie star mother and a financial tycoon father who collect Third World orphans. Unfortunately, Palahniuk's hell turns out to be a familiar place, filled with long lines, celebrities, dictators, mass murderers, lawyers, and pop culture references and jokes repeated until they are no longer funny. In the end, the author seems to be saying that the real hell is the banality of our earthly lives, an observation that itself seems a little too banal to power this work of fiction.
Customer Reviews
DAMNED
Revenge is a dish best served by Maddison Spencer, the most twisted, unlikely heroin of all your hellish nightmares... Quite literally, one of the most creative, mind bending journey through Hell, Heaven, Earth and our own perception of all three places, which essentially creates our own hellish condition and surroundings. Brilliantly perceptive! "What makes earth feel like Hell is out perception that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is earth. Dead is dead...."
Hell would be reading this again.
I pray the author kills their darlings after the first paragraph next time.