Okay, so the rundown is as follows: Whatever mojo Chuck Palahniuk had, it's gone now. Long gone. Damned is an ugly book, but not an entertainingly ugly book in the same way Choke or my personal favorite, Invisible Monsters was. The social pariahs encountered within these pages aren't half as interesting as the ones in Rant, and the cynicism is more choreographed than natural. In short, this reads like a book written by someone poorly imitating Chuck Palahniuk, and the last person in the world you should ever want to be a poor imitation of is Chuck Palahniuk. The descriptions are gross but seem kind of superfluous, the characters are one-dimensional except for Madison, who serves to alternately call every woman who isn't her "Slutty McVanderslut" and needlessly regurgitate the author's views. The plot is entirely beside the point, and the ranting interludes where Palahniuk rages against modern culture just seem like a list of things the author doesn't like.
On the off-chance that I missed the point of the book, it does do a pretty good job of moderning up The Divine Comedy, and there are some genuinely funny moments (like being chauffeured to Hell in a town car, or a demon asking "Are you familiar with the William Morris Agency?") here and there. But sifting through these is an exercise in torture itself, and even an ending where it turns out that most of the book is the angry rant of a dead teenager who was simply put in a bad circumstance can't really save this from being a complete miss. If you feel like reading Palahniuk, find his earlier novels when he still had something to say. It's pretty much all downhill from here.
