Novel idea is damned by problems
By Daily Bruin Staff
Sept. 24, 2000 9:00 p.m.
BOOK INFORMATION Â Â
Title: Damned If You Do
Author: Gordon Houghton
Publisher: Picador
Price:
$13.00Â Â Â Â Pages: 300
Original by ADAM BROWN/Daily Bruin Web Adaptation by Hernane
Tabay/Daily Bruin Senior Staff
By Michael Rosen-Molina
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The hero of “Damned if You Do” is enjoying a nice,
quiet evening at home, without a care in the world, when some
impolite intruder starts banging on his door.
It’s an old business acquaintance, who drags him out,
tells him that he’s won a lottery to become his new assistant
and then whisks him off to a week-long trial period hell ““
literally.
That’s bad enough, but if our hero is already dead, home
is a wooden box six feet below, and that rude stranger is the Grim
Reaper himself, things can only get worse.
That is the premise of the novel “Damned If You Do,”
by Gordon Houghton, a morbidly funny look at the sweet hereafter.
The narrator, an anonymous amnesiac, is yanked from his eternal
slumber to serve as an apprentice to Death. It seems that
Death’s old assistant met with an untimely … death, and
random chance has selected the nameless hero as his
replacement.
Now he’s to assist Death in his duties for one trial week,
dispatching one “customer” to his eternal reward each
day. If he does well, he’ll become a permanent staff member,
working the beat with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
If not, he’ll be returned to his coffin. He can make his
exit any way he wants, provided it is one of the termination
methods he witnessed during his apprenticeship.
When your clients include a man mangled in a freak carnival
accident, a trysting couple devoured by fire ants and an
accident-prone undertaker done in by a gas stove, a chain of
sausages, and his own clumsiness, this is no easy decision.
The Four Horsemen, additionally, are no medieval leftovers;
they’re fully modern harbingers of doom, overseeing a complex
web of underlings who travel the world in brand spanking new
Volkswagens. The big four themselves are little more than
administrators, buried under mountains of paperwork and red
tape.
Pestilence is most at home in his private laboratory, brewing up
new diseases, while War and his assistant Skirmish are the more
hands-on type, relishing any opportunity to stir up bar brawls and
recess fights.
Readers may find it difficult to relate to Houghton’s
zombie protagonist. Part of this is due to Houghton’s unique
idea of the undead mentality: the dead like the absolute solitude
and security of the grave.
“Damned if You Do” follows the hero’s rebirth,
as he slowly changes from a desensitized walking corpse,
preoccupied with getting back in the ground, to a zombie, eager to
return to the uncertainty and excitement of the living world.
The problem is that the reader never believes this
transformation. One of his last assignments is to kill a former
lover from his pervious life, an act which ought to provoke
horrified shock or at least very deep unease. Instead, he hardly
bats an eye at carrying out the duty. One might expect this sort of
reaction when our hero was still essentially an animated cadaver,
but it is hard to believe this late in the book when he is supposed
to possess a revitalized humanity.
Slowly, the zombie remembers fragments of his previous life, but
these never seem to paint a complete picture. The reader learns
everything about him except his name, but still feels like they
never meet him.
“Damned If You Do” raises a lot of interesting moral
and metaphysical questions, but it never works up the courage to
answer them.
“The Chief,” who occupies an upstairs office, is a
nebulous unseen presence dedicated to cruel efficiency. Divorced
from mortal affairs, he has little connection with humans and thus
little sympathy with their problems. The idea that “The
Chief” is out-of-touch and needlessly harsh is one that
deserves more exploration than Houghton is willing to give it.
Death, on the other hand, is constantly exposed to humanity at its
most vulnerable, but has developed a conscience regarding his work
as pointless.
In one interesting passage, Death muses philosophically about
his role in the world. All human achievement is pointless, he
laments, because it all succumbs to death in the end.
If it is Death’s job that renders everything else
meaningless; does that make Death meaningless, too? A vexing
existential puzzle, indeed, made all the more irritating when Death
never comes to any satisfactory conclusion.
Throughout the book, “The Chief” orders the Four
Horsemen to gather certain ill-fated people, whom it is suggested
will play some major role in his “master plan.” What
the master plan is, however, and why he needs these people is never
explained, or even adequately insinuated.
“Damned If You Do” is a flawed but interesting work.
Its skewed look at the great beyond is certainly original, but
ultimately it leaves the reader unsatisfied. It recalls other
apocalyptic parodies, like Terry Prattchett’s “Good
Omens” or Marcos Donnelly’s “Prophets For the End
of Time” and ultimately suffers for the comparison. While
those books actually attempted to solve the dilemmas they raised,
Houghton is content to throw puzzles at his audience without any
attempt at explanation.
Still, “Damned If You Do” contains enough funny
scenes that less finicky readers can enjoy it as a pleasant
diversion. After all, it is hard not to find something to like
about a Grim Reaper who finds his portrayal in “The Seventh
Seal” dull and pretentious, preferring instead “Bill
and Ted’s Bogus Journey.”
