...I got nothin'

[coyotegoth]

From the Random House "About this book" description of Chuck Palahniuk's Damned, by way of james_nicoll:

“Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison,” declares the whip-tongued eleven-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk’s subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari­juana overdose—and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell. Madison shares her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that is almost too good to be true: a cheerleader, a jock, a nerd, and a punk rocker, united by fate to form the six-feet-under version of everyone’s favorite detention movie. Madison and her pals trek across the Dandruff Desert and climb the treacherous Mountain of Toenail Clippings to confront Satan in his citadel. All the popcorn balls and wax lips that serve as the currency of Hell won’t buy them off.

This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno where The English Patient plays on end­less repeat, roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb, and the damned interrupt your dinner from their sweltering call center to hard-sell you Hell. He makes eternal torment, well, simply divine.

Less braintwistingly, kradical provides this link to a 1958 conversation between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming.

Comments

[gtrout.livejournal.com]

She dies of a marijuana overdose? That's not even possible. Unless you, like, eat so many Chips Ahoy that you go into diabetic shock or something...

Other than that, sounds like fun.

[rafaela.livejournal.com]

For horrifying accounts of the afterlife, I usually refer people to Jean-Paul Sartre. Of course, that could be because I was in a production of No Exit when I was a mere 16 and did a damn good job of playing angry, jealous social outcast Inez.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

She dies of a what, now?

Is it sad that this detail makes me not want to read this book?