Damn, it is this good!!

Excerpt from Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. I’m just now arrived here, in Hell, but it’s not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana. Maybe I’m in Hell because I’m fat—a Real Porker. If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here. I wish I could lie and tell you I’m bone-thin with blond hair and big ta-tas. But, trust me, I’m fat for a really good reason.

To start with, please let me introduce myself.

How to best convey the exact sensation of being dead…

Yes, I know the word convey. I’m dead, not a mental defective.

Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

The closest way I can describe death is to compare it to when my mom boots up her notebook computer and hacks into the surveillance system of our house in Mazatlan or Banff. “Look,” she’d say, turning the screen sideways for me to see, “it’s snowing.” Glowing softly on the computer would be the interior of our Milan house, the sitting room, with snow falling outside the big windows, and by long distance, holding down her Control, Alt and W keys, my mom would draw open the sitting room drapes all the way. Pressing the Control and D keys, she’d dim the lights by remote control and we’d both sit, on a train or in a rented town car or aboard a leased jet, watching the pretty winter view through the windows of that empty house displayed on her computer screen. With the Control and F keys, she’d light a fire in the gas fireplace, and we’d listen to the hush of the Italian snow falling, the crackle of the flames via the audio monitors of the security system. After that, my mom would keyboard into the system for our house in Cape Town. Then log on to view our house in Brentwood. She could simultaneously be all places but no place, mooning over sunsets and foliage everywhere except where she actually was. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur.

My input: This is another book I simply went browsing in the bookstore.. Another book that managed to grab my attention.. At these sentences of "At best, a sentry" and "At worst, a voyeur", I was completely astounded and blown away by the magnificence of Palahniuk's own writings.. Words just can't describe the brilliance of this writer.. The writer was talking about the protagonist's experience of being able to be at two places at the same time and then he quickly summed it up by those brief deft sentences.. 

Over the years, I have seen the author's writings getting better and better by the day.. Not to say that his previous writings were not good, his latest offering was just simply breathtaking.. I was completely taken aback.. I knew it had to be modern because I had never seen such writings (poetry mixed with narrative) in such choice of words from any writers before, if you know what I mean..