Damned

May 2, 2011
Move over, Dante, there's a new tour guide to hell: Madison Spencer, the 13-year-old narrator of Palahniuk's cliché-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.

Starred review from January 2, 2012
A teenage girl named Madison dies of a drug overdose and awakens in hell, alongside every stereotypical character in the history of bad writing: a jock, a cheerleader, a headbanger, and, naturally, a science dweeb. The twist is that this is a hell that only Palahniuk could have imagined, and the journey to escape it is as unpredictable as anything he’s ever written. Narrator Tai Sammons delivers a stellar reading in which she captures the essence of Madison. Her dialect, delivery, and tone are perfectly suited to that of a 13-year-old who’s having a really, really bad day. Listening to Sammons’s narration is an intimate experience as her rendition of Madison pours her heart out and prays her words won’t fall only on dead ears. A Doubleday hardcover.