Damned

January 2013:

I needed something a bit less intense after reading the Best of Me.  So I finally got around to reading Damned.  It was funny, and a bit messed up in true Chuck fashion.  I didn't love the book, but I didn't hate it either.  It was just "Eh".

The novel opens with Madison "Maddy" Spencer (13) waking in Hell, unsure of the details surrounding her death (she believes she has died of a marijuana overdose). Maddy quickly gets to know her nearby cellmates. The group (loosely modeled on the character traits in "The Breakfast Club," i.e., a rocker, a nerd, a beauty and a jock) take Maddy on a tour of Hell.

In Hell, Madison works as a telemarketer, calling the living during mealtimes and asking them to answer insane survey questions. Throughout the novel, we see Madison's interactions with the living as well as the dead as she tries to piece together the events surrounding her death, and figure out how best to cope with the idea of spending the rest of eternity in Hell.

We discover that her adopted Brother Goran had in fact accidentally strangled her while playing a "Kiss from Death" game with a string of Hello kitty Condoms her parents had left her with.  She then takes over hell, and fights off adversaries like Hitler, and all the worst Demons to rule the underground.  The dead get to surface Earth on Halloween so in doing so she finds out that the Devil himself had invented the character that Maddy lives to be true.  He orchestrated her life in such a way that lead her to hell to lure more souls into Hell.  He raves about her being his best work yet.

Maddy is in denial and trying to seperate truth from reality.  In doing so she decides that once she returns to Hell she is going to Kill Satan.  Only to discover that she has been approved to return to the living based off of misfiled paperwork.  You are left with a To be continued...