‘Damned’ by Chuck Palahniuk
It was around this time last year that I read Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk’s 2005 novel-cum-short story collection, and was by turns enthralled and totally appalled by its contents. Do I even need to mention Guts? Nope, I thought not. Anyway, this time I have plumped for one of Palahniuk’s more recent works of fiction - Damned, the story of a thirteen-year-old girl who dies of a suspected drug overdose and is duly dispatched to the fiery depths of hell. And why is she sent to hell, you ask? Well, it is really rather difficult to say. If you can, try to imagine the premise of The Lovely Bones turned on its head and this should give you a fair idea of what Damned is all about, at least on a superficial level. However, Chuck Palahniuk is a very different writer from Alice Sebold, and Damned is a different beast entirely.
Published late last year and marking the author’s twelfth full-length fiction outing, Damned is told from the perspective of a recently deceased thirteen-year-old named Madison Spencer. The daughter of a self-important film star and a distracted billionaire, Madison finds herself in hell after dying of what we are told - and what she assumes - was a marijuana overdose. Ominous. Adhering to the Dante Alighieri-coined credo of ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ Madison first sets about letting go of her hope of ever returning to the living world, a world in which her parents regularly fly to impoverished nations collecting orphans to act as Madison’s siblings. One of these orphans, a swarthy, Heathcliff-esque boy called Goran, makes an unusually strong impression on Madison and in turn becomes instrumental in her discovering why exactly she has been sent to hell.
Damned is filled with scenes that are as amusing as they are implausible, such as Madison taking a lie detector test manned by none other than Satan himself, not to mention her stomach-turning journey into the oversized genitalia of a giant demon named Psezpolnica. Yes really. And no, even assuming that the 'p’ is silent, I still have no idea how to pronounce that. Furthermore, it is clear that a hell of a lot of research went into Damned, for the first few pictures read like a history of demonology, with Japanese Oni demons and all kinds of Ancient Greek evil-doers referenced heavily. Of all the demonic names that Palahniuk drops, my firm favourite is that of the Mexican god of evil, Tlacatecolototl, perhaps because it makes pronouncing Psezpolnica seem like a goddamn cakewalk. As always, all of Palahniuk’s pop culture references are also pitch-perfect, with The Breakfast Club and Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret borrowed from to various extents.
Yet in spite of its darker-than-dark subject matter and its frequent gross-out sequences, Damned is in fact a work of surprising tenderness. This may be down to the narrative perspective - Madison is after all just thirteen years old - or it could be down to the fact that Chuck Palahniuk wrote Damned with his late mother in mind; I read that she passed away in 2009. Regardless of whether it was conscious or not, the edgier strands of the story certainly benefit from this added warmth. No pun intended, I promise. Despite having a similarly adjectival title, Damned has little in common with Haunted, the last Chuck Palahniuk work I dealt with. Of course there are some surface similarities, namely the way the landscape of hell is depicted (think cell blocks, great piles of broken glass, and a large body of fetid water known only as Shit Lake), but the overall effect of the work is decidedly different. Damned may be shocking, sure, but a gratuitous piece of gross-out literature it is not. In its 247 pages the novel throws up numerous observations about life, death and the universe, and many if not most of them are indispensable. I will leave you with my favourite of these passages, from page 165 of Damned:
’No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it’s as zombies…vampires…ghosts, always something threatening to the living. The dead are depicted the way blacks were in 1960s mass culture, as a constant danger and menace. Any dead characters must be banished, exorcised, driven from the property like Jews in the fourteenth century. Deported like illegal-alien Mexicans. Like lepers.’
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in November 2012.