Read more
Zusatztext 42759384 Informationen zum Autor Chuck Palahniuk Klappentext "Are you there! Satan? It's me! Madison!" declares the whip-tongued thirteen-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. Leseprobe I. Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. I’m just now arrived here, in Hell, but it’s not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana. Maybe I’m in Hell because I’m fat--a Real Porker. If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here. I wish I could lie and tell you I’m bone-thin with blond hair and big ta-tas. But, trust me, I’m fat for a really good reason. To start with, please let me introduce myself. How to best convey the exact sensation of being dead?.?.?. Yes, I know the word convey. I’m dead, not a mental defective. Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead. The closest way I can describe death is to compare it to when my mom boots up her notebook computer and hacks into the surveillance system of our house in Mazatlan or Banff. “Look,” she’d say, turning the screen sideways for me to see, “it’s snowing.” Glowing softly on the computer would be the interior of our Milan house, the sitting room, with snow falling outside the big windows, and by long distance, holding down her Control, Alt and W keys, my mom would draw open the sitting room drapes all the way. Pressing the Control and D keys, she’d dim the lights by remote control and we’d both sit, on a train or in a rented town car or aboard a leased jet, watching the pretty winter view through the windows of that empty house displayed on her computer screen. With the Control and F keys, she’d light a fire in the gas fireplace, and we’d listen to the hush of the Italian snow falling, the crackle of the flames via the audio monitors of the security system. After that, my mom would keyboard into the system for our house in Cape Town. Then log on to view our house in Brentwood. She could simultaneously be all places but no place, mooning over sunsets and foliage everywhere except where she actually was. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur. My mom will kill half a day on her notebook computer just looking at empty rooms full of our furniture. Tweaking the thermostat by remote control. Turning down the lights and choosing the right level of soft music to play in each room. “Just to keep the cat burglars guessing,” she’d tell me. She’d toggle from camera to camera, watching the Somali maid clean our house in Paris. Hunched over her computer screen, she’d sigh and say, “My crocus are blooming in London.?.?.?.” From be...
