Book 40: Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

So, this one is cheating a little bit.  I listened to this book about a month ago as an audiobook.  Because of the start-and-stop nature and the length of time it took to finish the book in this format (I listened to it each night while doing dishes for about three weeks), I feel like I might not have gotten the full experience that I would have reading the paper version.  Therefore, I'm now reading the "real" book in order to debunk this idea or confirm it.  If, at the end of the week, I find that there are things that I missed while listening to the audiobook then I will probably stick with text.  Otherwise, hell, I might just pick up a few more audiobooks because it sure made dishes a bit more fun.

The physical version of this book is 246 pages or 36 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This was a fun read.  I didn't find that there was any difference between the audio and text versions of the book, and I didn't find that I missed anything by listening to the book rather than reading it.  It was definitely faster to read the book and I got a little surprise at the end when I saw that it said "To be continued...", but I'm not sure if that's just a joke on the author's part of if this really the first part of a series.  I really can't see where the book would go from where it left off, but hey, maybe Palahniuk knows what he's doing.

The book in general is very funny.  Palahniuk's version of hell is simultaneously disturbing, disgusting and hilarious.  I love the idea that the arch demons are really just ex-gods that nobody believes in anymore, hence making them angry and cruel.  The main character, Madison, was also very funny.  She constantly berates the reader for underestimating her intelligence and her vocabulary and ridicules the hypocrisy of her ultra-liberal yet highly materialistic jet-set celebrity parents.  I also found the parallel Palahniuk draws between the main group of characters and an analogous group of characters from a movie (I don't want to spoil it) to be very entertaining, though he ultimately didn't really do anything with this concept.

The main draw for the plot was that each character seemed to be in hell for a relatively minor offense (marijuana overdose, wearing white after Labor Day, etc.).  You know that there must be more to their stories, but the author strings you along with hints for most of the novel.  Unfortunately, after the "big reveal", there is a lot less to drive the story forward.  It feels like the narrative just starts to continue on the momentum of the first two-thirds of the book without a lot of direction.  Eventually, you get an ending without any real resolution and are stuck with a "To be continued..." to really drive the ambiguity home.

Weak, ambiguous ending aside, the book was quite fun to read and very funny in many places.  Another good Palahniuk novel though not among his top works.

7 out of 10.