 Doubleday cover | |
| Author | Chuck Palahniuk |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Rodrigo Corral |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
Publication date | September 1, 2011 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 247 |
| ISBN | 978-0-224-09115-2 |
| Followed by | Doomed |
Damned is a 2011 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. A sequel to the novel, Doomed , was released in 2013.
The novel opens with 13-year-old Madison "Maddy" Spencer waking in Hell, unsure of the details surrounding her death. She believes she died of a marijuana overdose while her celebrity parents were attending the Academy Awards. Maddy quickly gets to know her nearby cellmates. The group (loosely modeled on the archetypes of characters from 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 to ask them inane survey questions. For the most part, only the terminally ill and elderly answer Madison's surveys and they are charmed by her, so much so that she convinces them to commit mortal sins so they can spend eternity in Hell with her. Madison becomes the top recruiter of souls for the damned and begins to collect an army of admirers and friends with whom she conquers all of the "bullies" of Hell including Adolf Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred II and Catherine de Medici. She uses her new-found army to beautify hell and orders them to paint the bats to make them look more like birds, drain a lake of saliva, etc. Madison's sway becomes so large that eventually Satan himself tries to convince her that she is one of his own creations, specially designed to lure souls into his dominion.
Throughout the novel, Madison's interactions with the living as well as the dead are depicted as she tries to piece together the events surrounding her death, and figure out how best to cope with her dire circumstances. She eventually learns that she was accidentally strangled to death by her adopted brother, Goran, in a game of erotic asphyxiation that she learned while attending boarding school.
Just as Madison begins to carve a niche for herself, she finds out she was sent to Hell in error and can go to heaven, if she so chooses. Instead, she opts to stay in Hell. The novel concludes with a cliffhanger as Madison goes to confront Satan, suggesting that her adventures will continue in a sequel.
The novel is based on the structure of Judy Blume novels, particularly Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret . The novel was written by Palahniuk as a way to deal with his mother's death from lung cancer in 2009. [1] [2]
Palahniuk has described the novel as "if The Shawshank Redemption had a baby by The Lovely Bones and it was raised by Judy Blume." [1] and "it's kind of like The Breakfast Club set in Hell." [3]
Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk is an American novelist who describes his work as transgressional fiction. He has published 19 novels, three nonfiction books, two graphic novels, and two adult coloring books, as well as several short stories. His first published novel was Fight Club, which was adapted into a film of the same title.
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"The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) is a short story by American writer Stephen Vincent Benét. He tells of a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil and is later defended by a fictionalized Daniel Webster, a noted 19th-century American statesman, lawyer and orator. The narrative references real events in the lives of Webster and his family.
Memnoch the Devil (1995) is a vampire novel by American writer Anne Rice, the fifth in her Vampire Chronicles series, following The Tale of the Body Thief. In this story, Lestat is approached by the Devil and offered a job at his side.
Old Harry's Game is a UK radio comedy written, directed and starring Andy Hamilton, who plays the cynical, world-weary Satan. "Old Harry" is one of many names for the devil. The show's title is a humorous play on the title of the 1982 TV series Harry's Game.
Lullaby is a horror-satire novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk, published in 2002. It won the 2003 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel in 2002.
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Constantine is a 2005 American superhero horror film directed by Francis Lawrence in his directorial debut. Written by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello from a story by Brodbin, it is loosely based on the DC Comics/Vertigo Comics Hellblazer graphic novels. The film stars Keanu Reeves as John Constantine, a cynical exorcist with the ability to perceive and communicate with half-angels and half-demons in their true forms and to travel between Earth and Hell. Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Tilda Swinton, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Djimon Hounsou, Gavin Rossdale, and Peter Stormare also feature.
Haunted is a 2005 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is a frame story for a series of 23 short stories, most preceded by a free verse poem. Each story is followed by a chapter of the main narrative, as told by a character in main narrative, and ties back into the main story in some way. Typical of Palahniuk's work, the dominant motifs in Haunted are sexual deviance, sexual identity, desperation, social distastefulness, disease, murder, death, and existentialism.
Tiger Eyes is a young adult novel written by Judy Blume in 1981 about a 15-year-old girl attempting to cope with the unexpected death of her father. In 2012, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Judy's son, Lawrence Blume, and starring Willa Holland as Davey Wexler.
Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness is a role-playing video game released by Tecmo in 1996 for the original PlayStation. Although often referred to simply as "Deception", the game's official title is Tecmo's Deception. Tecmo's Deception was released as Kokumeikan (刻命館) in Japan, and as Devil's Deception in Europe. The game inverts the common tropes of role-playing video games by placing the player in the role of an evil lord who must use traps and monsters to kill the adventuring parties which invade his castle. As the story progresses, the player character learns he has been the victim of multiple deceptions, and must decide whether to proceed with his plan to revive the Devil or convert to the cause of good.
Carlton Mellick III is an American author currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He is best known as one of the leading authors in the Bizarro movement in underground literature.
Elene is a poem in Old English, that is sometimes known as Saint Helena Finds the True Cross. It was translated from a Latin text and is the longest of Cynewulf's four signed poems. It is the last of six poems appearing in the Vercelli manuscript, which also contains The Fates of the Apostles, Andreas, Soul and Body I, the Homiletic Fragment I and Dream of the Rood. The poem is the first English account of the finding of the Holy Cross by Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine. The poem was written by Cynewulf some time between 750 and the tenth century. It is written in a West Saxon dialect, but certain Anglianisms and metrical evidence concerning false rhymes suggest it was written in an Anglian rather than Saxon dialect. It is 1,321 lines long.
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races. It was published in French, in a translation by Robert Pinget revised by Beckett himself, as Tous ceux qui tombent.
The idea of making a deal with the devil has appeared many times in works of popular culture. These pacts with the Devil can be found in many genres, including: books, music, comics, theater, movies, TV shows and games. When it comes to making a contract with the Devil, they all share the same prevailing desire, a mortal wants some worldly good for their own selfish gain, but in exchange, they must give up their soul for eternity.
Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It was Palahniuk's first published novel, and follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. The protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups, after his doctor remarks that insomnia is not "real suffering" and that he should find out what it is really like to suffer. The protagonist then meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.
Doomed is a 2013 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It is the second novel in a planned trilogy that started with Damned.
Dead in Tombstone is a 2013 American direct-to-video horror Western film produced by Universal 1440 Entertainment. It was directed by Roel Reiné and written by Shane Kuhn and Brendan Cowles. The film stars Danny Trejo as Guerrero, a gang leader who gets double-crossed by his fellow gang members. Striking a pact with the Devil after entering Hell, he resurfaces to the earthly world to avenge his own death by killing the men who murdered him. The film was released in home media on October 22, 2013, and was followed by a sequel, Dead Again in Tombstone (2017).
Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread is a collection of short stories published on May 26, 2015, and written by Chuck Palahniuk.