Damned If You Do: A Novel [Paperback]

Gordon Houghton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2000

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...

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Demonstrating a comic style reminiscent of both Nick Hornby and Monty Python, Houghton's novel is a funny, if sometimes sophomoric, look at death in all of its absurd forms. In an Oxford cemetery, the unnamed male narrator, who recently died at age 28, awakes from his eternal rest and discovers that he has been randomly selected to be Death's assistant for a week. Each day, the narrator accompanies Death around town on assignments. Poisoned chocolates, ravenous ants, a ludicrous chain of clumsy accidents--each of the seven days explores a new manner of kicking off. These events are interwoven with the narrator's memories of his own final days of life, when he worked as a somewhat hapless private investigator. Much of the novel's humor resides in the interplay among Death and the other three apocalyptic horsemen, War, Pestilence, and Famine, a quarrelsome, disorganized bunch. When the death gags start to die down about halfway through, Houghton wisely breathes life into a suspenseful subplot, as the narrator's apprenticeship nears its close. James Klise

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (July 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312262884
• ISBN-13: 978-0312262884
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Silly to serious, June 29, 2000

By 

Kevin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Damned If You Do: A Novel (Paperback)

As the main character,a corpse brought back from the dead to become an apprentice to Death, follows along and aids Death in helping people meet their seemingly untimely demise, he reflects back on his own short life. While the reincarnated zombie is with Death and his comrades (War, Pestilence, and Famine) the writing is darkly humorous with light and witty banter between the demonic factions. However, as the zombie reflects back on his own life and how he died, the book takes on a serious and somewhat depressing feel. Trying to remember how he died, he rehashes some old feelings about the only true love that he lost and what it really means to live. And what exactly "living" really is.

Houghton has the same dry, dark humor that Neil Gaiman displays in "Good Omens". The book moves along nicely with quick interludes between the sorrowful past and the deadly present. Suspence builds in seeing if the zombie will become an apprentice of Death or have to be killed by the end of the week if he doesn't please "the Chief" with his performance. If the end result is death then he must chose one of the methods with which he used earler in the week with Death to do away with the "Lifers". None of the very imaginative deaths seem like a good choice. Or could he cheat Death altogether the second time around?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Darker Douglas Adams, April 16, 2003

By 

Brian Bagnall (Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Damned If You Do: A Novel (Paperback)

My first thought on reading the inside jacket cover was that it was a ... of Neil Gaimon's the Sandman, in which Lucifer retires from running hell. It is not about that at all, but the mention of Hades and finding a replacement made it seem so. In fact, the book is closer to Douglas Adams, but much (much) more darker. The style and some of the humor may be similar, but the content is different. Houghton's writing is lively, intelligent, and engrossing.

The main figure in the book is recently deceased, but he awakens as a zombie. This part of the book is rippling with imagination, and is a joy to read. The cast of characters he meets are also quite intriguing, and you never know which way things will go. One of the central figures in the book is Death. At first I thought he would be like the Death figure from Monty Pythons Meaning of Life, but he actually has a very nice, almost fatherly relationship with the protagonist.

Probably the weakest areas of the book are the flashbacks to the main characters mortal life. As the book progresses the character gets more memories back, shedding light on who he was. Apparently he was a dull bore, or at least that is the way the flashbacks make it seem. I understand how this was supposed to play out, with a mystery slowly building and finally a realization at the end when his memory is fully restored, but it did not have that effect on me. It could have been called "flashback to generic childhood".

I also found many of his characters to behave like evil archetypes, rather than real people. For some strange reason, all of the females in the book are just innocent children. This might be my own personal preference, but I like books where the people behave in a truthful way, even when the scenario is whacked out. There is a mobster type of character who is so bad he even pees on his girlfriend. Reading a character like this, there just does not seem to be much truth to it. The people I have met in life are good 99% of the time, and it is the 1% of the time when they aren't good that pisses you off. Houghtons mobster is bad 100% of the time, which makes him predicatable and boring. Another character buries his girlfriend alive in a coffin. It seems hard to find any mortal in this book that is just normal. Maybe if you liked "The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and Her Lover" you might enjoy these aspects of the book, but it seemed overly dark to me.

The scenario of the four horsemen of the apocalypse working in a beaurocracy, with "the man upstairs" passing down directives, is just excellent. The book is a little tarnished because of the dull, depressing flashbacks, but it deserves four stars because of the characters, the premise, the originality, and the interplay between the characters. Skip the flashback scenes and it makes for a better book.

Houghton shows a lot of promise from his first book, as long as he can get an editor "mean" enough to take a red marker to his manuscript. Douglas Adams is dead but the good news is Gordon Houghton is still here.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wistfully Surreal Slapstick, April 3, 2001

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Damned If You Do: A Novel (Paperback)

Set in Oxford, this first-person account of a week in the (after)life of a zombie is by turns slapstick, surreal, and wistful. Corpse #72 18 9 11 12 13 49 is dragged out of his grave by Death (yes Death, he of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse--only now they are the 4 Car Drivers of the Apocalypse), who is looking for a replacement for Hades. It seems Hades was recently ripped apart by Cerebus, but it's not really clear who masterminded the attack. The zombie has a week to prove himself a capable assistant, or else he gets re-offed and returned to the grave.

Most of the humor comes in the portrayal of Death, Disease, Famine, War, and underling Skirmish, as petty bureaucrats who bickerer and whine their way through the week. Pestilence is constantly experimenting with new plagues to unleash, if only he got approval from "The Chief." War and Skirmish revel in bar-room brawls and instigating playground fights. Death, on the other hand, is kind of bored and fed up with everything. It has more than a slight whiff of Monty Python about it all. The narrative alternates between recounting the day's activities (each day brings with it an "accidental" death to oversee), and ruminations on the zombie's life before his death at age 28. Although we know he died falling off a roof, he slowly unveils his life story leading up to that moment. Old relationships are rehashed, and he reflects on having squandered his life. Some moderate tension is built as we learn more and more about his final hours, and he realizes he desperately wants to give life a second chance--which of course means cheating Death...