Damned

An overdose delivers the 13-year-old narrator of Chuck Palahniuk's new novel straight to perdition, where she finds a veritable Breakfast Club of cohorts (cheerleader, jock, nerd, punk rocker) to cavort with in the maze of eternity. By turns hilarious and disturbing, the author's twisted vision of Hell isn't filled with flames and brimstone so much as dandruff and toenail clippings in a hilarious, impious reinterpretation of Dantean tropes.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

advertisement