There’s a new Chuck Palahniuk book out called Damned.  It’s about a 13-year-old girl who wakes up one day in Hell.  It sounds remarkably similar to another book called Heck written by another Pacific Northwest author named Dale E. Basye—not that I’m intimating that Palahniuk stole ideas and plots and stuff like that.  

I haven’t read Damned.  I haven’t read a Palahniuk book in nearly 10 years.  I was quite a big fan of his after reading Fight Club and Survivor and I’d like to think that those two books hold up but most likely they don’t.  (However I did watch the Fight Club movie recently and it’s still a riot.)  Palahniuk’s works cast a magnetic attraction to angry young men.  But I’m 30 now and a relatively-young man who’s more amused than angry and 12 years can offer something that Chuck Palahniuk can’t: perspective.

 It’s funny, you know, I just read an interview with him—in that morbidly curious way in which you search for old high school friends on Facebook and come away equal parts disappointed and bored by the results—and the guy is still the same.  He was talking about how he has to push beyond the limits of shock so that people will remember him.  He said something to the effect of, “The trick is to be shocking so that people won’t forget you,” and I just thought, Really?  Still?  That’s what you think is insightful when you’re 17, not when you’re galloping up to 50.  

So I was reading some early Amazon reviews of Damned and was amazed, but not really, that in Palahniuk’s hell, The English Patient plays on a loop.  Because of course, right?  Seriously, though, in 2011 who even thinks of that?  The English Patient?  How fucking predictable and boring and safe is that?  The guy who wrote Fight Club thinks hell is having to watch The English Patient.  That’s original.  

Isn’t it?