“Chuck Palahniuk’s newest, Damned, just came out…in advanced reader version! The rest of you sucka-fools will have to wait until October. So enjoy being a sucka-fool, which sucks because sucka-fools, as you may have already heard, don’t know S about F.
Anyway, me and Chucky P have a long and storied history. I think he might be the only author whose entire oeuvre of full-length books I’ve read. What about Harper Lee, one-book wonder author of To Kill a Mockingbird?Well, I haven’t read that, but I gather it’s for sucka-fools (see above re: S about F). Needless to say, Mr. Palklhfddjjdhf*$* and I have a long and storied relationship.
Damned is better than his last couple, Tell-All and Pygmy. For me at least. And at the same time, it’s worse.
Damned follows a little girl, Madison, the only biological daughter of a couple that resembles Brangelina in every sense but the bearded ones, on her post-mortem adventures in hell. It’s being sold as a Judy Blume style of book, except that the main character is in hell and there is a touch of oral sex.
The hell portions were like bizarro-lite, similar to such wonderful works as Satan Burger and The Menstruating Mall by Carlton Mellick III (who also wrote a faux-children’s book called The Faggiest Vampire, a title that always makes me giggle. C’mon. I know we’re not supposed to use that word anymore, but it’s so rarely ended in the superlative form that it’s hard not to snicker). I don’t know if being bizarro-lite is a compliment or not. Bizarro lit is interesting in its own right, and maybe those who are not attracted to it in general would enjoy just a taste. But to me, I don’t know how interesting a lite version of it is. Would anyone enjoy terribly watching Human Centipede with most of the unpleasantness cut out? Is there a life lesson within the story of faces being surgery-ed to asses that I may be missing? I will guess that perhaps there is, but that Human Centipede: Censor’s Cut may not be the best way to absorb them.
The parts of Damned I most enjoyed were the parts that felt the most like vintage Palahniuk to me, the sections that were less about hell and more about the disconnect between different kinds of people, in this case the living and the dead. At the same time, these were the parts I hated because they made me feel like I was missing out on something really great. They reminded me of the author I really loved and how his work isn’t quite scratching the same itch for me. It’s like having a favorite song, but being doomed to forever only being able to hear the live version, which is a little jammy and of lower sound quality. It’s good, but it’s almost worse because it reminds you of something you’ll never have again.”