Strange to start this project with a sequel, but Doomed, the second part of Chuck Palahniuk's Damned trilogy, just happened to be the book I was reading when I started making the list. So here it is.
Palahniuk is one of those authors I have long kept going back to, having enjoyed several of his early novels and short stories as well as his Non-Fiction collection. He's best known for Fight Club and after that perhaps for the utterly horrifying Guts from his collection Haunted, which is one of the few short stories I know of to have gone viral, after it featured in Playboy.
I read part one, Damned, a couple of years ago. That booked pushed a number of my buttons, being set in Hell (I can never get enough visions of the Underworld) and narrated by a sardonic teenager (which is who I really am, deep inside, clearly). I recall it being in turns entertaining and baffling.
Sadly I got much more of the latter from this second installment. There are parts of the telling that just made me wince - and not in that good, 'what a deliciously devilish situation to put your characters in' way. The opening of every chapter with 'Gentle Tweeter' tires quickly - especially as although the chapters are written as updates that unseen characters are supposed to be on live, it doesn't feel at all like Twitter. It feels more as if Palahniuk wanted to get the social media platform in there without really understanding how it works. Then, Madison (the said sardonic teenager) makes constant disparaging references to her weight, which also gets old very fast. Although I think it's probably meant to be sympathetic to a teenage girl having difficulty with her body image, at times it's hard not to read it as straightforward fat-shaming. Worse, there are chapters where we're told that she used to be 'svelte', then in flashback she appears to be throwing away all the food offered to her, and yet somehow - at least as I read it - she's calling herself 'chubby' and so on again before the obscene events that supposedly led to her weight-gain occurred. It felt like the author had forgotten the words he'd put in her mouth earlier in the book.
I started out enjoying getting spending in Madison's 'post-alive' head again as she is indeed a charming character [your milage may vary]. But there is just too much that misfires in Doomed; events that stretch credulity too far even for this absurd fantasy setting, and confusing narrative elements like the above. For all that, the final, apocalyptic pages made for a compelling set-piece and had me rooting for our plucky hero, and might just have me coming back for the final installment when it comes (sucker that I am). But I do hope it's less patchy than this one.
⭐⭐
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