Don't laugh - for some reason this was QUITE the struggle...for one, work has been getting busy again so its officially audiobook season and for two. I just...didn't get it and, thankfully, after reading through some of the goodreads reviews I was able to find I am not the only one.
I was introduced to Chuck P. through his best known work, Fight Club. Through the late nineties, early 2000's I fairly frequently turned to his novels as a sort of macabre commentary on life. With his "less than normal" characters and blunt writing style, he definitely fit into my life genre at that time.
Back to Damned. The story seems simple enough, a 13 year old girl dies and goes to Hell. In life, she was the spoiled daughter of a movie star, in death she was simply a 13 year old dead girl. Each chapter starts with "Are you there Satan, it's me Madison" as a callback to "Are you there God, it's Me Margaret." As that would be exactly the kind of reading material in Madison's library, it seemed like a quirky yet appropriate reference. But then we jump to analogies of "The Breakfast Club" between her friends in hell, some throw backs to Dante's Inferno, Jane Eyre and, I don't know. It got all mixed up in there for me.
Some of the more disturbing references include but are not limited to: landscapes full of partial birth abortions (or feces, or toenail clippings or wasted sperm, or tepid bile - take your pick); being damned to hell for peeing in a public pool more than twice or using the horn on your vehicle too much; and an extremely disturbing scene which for some reason, that was never fully explained, involved a demon receiving oral pleasure from a severed head.
A lack of continuity, gratuitous and unnecessary grossness and a conclusion that makes absolutely no sense no wonder it took me the whole week to slog through a bit at a time...
"The only thing that makes Earth feel like Hell, or Hell feel like Hell, is our expectation that it ought to feel like Heaven."
Goodreads rating: 3 (rounded up from 2.5 just out of respect for an author that I used to respect)
In Progress (audio): The Firm by John Grisham
On Deck (nook): The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan
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