Damned If You Do
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Hades is dead and the Agency needs a replacement, a new apprentice to carry on its good work. After a vote, corpse number 72 18 9 11 12 13 49 is selected and promptly yanked from his grave, to serve a seven day trial sentence. Each day our hapless narrator is to assist Death in the killing of one unfortunate soul, but as he encounters each victim, and as he begins to grasp the functions of Death and the other three modern-day Horsemen, he begins to unlock strange memories of his own prior life. It is not until he understands the backhanded politics of the Four Horsemen's run-down row house, and the sinister circumstances of his predecessor's demise, that he can recognize his true purpose in, well, er, life...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Death isn't all it's cracked up to be in Houghton's very British novel. In fact, Death is a haggard and disillusioned bureaucrat, who has long ago stopped pondering the chief's ultimate vision even as he goes about his grisly business: pushing a depressed woman off a building, setting army ants on innocent lovers and dismembering the passenger of a carnival ride in a bizarre accident. Along with his companions, War, Famine and Pestilence, the paper-pushing grim reaper rents office space in Oxford, England. The four employ a general assistant, the punky, ambitious Skirmish, but Death's personal assistant has just been eviscerated, so Death resurrects a deceased private detective to take his place. The novel is told from this unnamed zombie's point of view. As the zombie assists Death on his rounds, he has to get reacquainted with mobility, digestion and excretion. He's in rather good shape, actually, save for a missing penis and a particularly scrawny physique. Over the course of his week with Death, he copes with memories of his former life, many of them centering on Amy, the love of his life, who married someone else. Only after he became a private investigator did they meet again, when, coincidentally, Amy asked him to run an investigation on her abusive husband. In between dealing out plague-infected chocolates and looking up files, the zombie finally remembers the manner of his death. At the end of the week, Death discharges him, which usually means a return to corpsehood. But then the zombie challenges him to a game of chess. Houghton's dark riffs are amusing, but the novel's big extended joke gets a little tired before the end.