I wouldn't call myself a fan of horror, but The Damned was highly recommended to me by Dan, so I gave it a shot and my short review is: This is a quick read with some interesting ideas and a few chills. Not a waste of my time, but not something I'd "highly recommend", except perhaps, to superfans of the genre. Sorry Dan, not my cuppa.
The protagonist, Danny Orchard, is a "D-List" celebrity. After dying on his 16th birthday, and returning from the other side with proof, he eventually wrote a best-selling book about his adventure and spent the next two decades attending meetings of survivors of near death experiences ("like AA with booze"), giving talks and signing copies of his book. What he never told anyone, however, was that his twin sister Ash, who died in the same incident but who was not resuscitated, had been haunting him ever since; as evil in death as she had been in life.
Sometimes there is a scent that precedes her appearances, less borne on the air than held tight against my face, an invisible, smothering cloth. And soaked in this cloth an odor that carries a feeling with it, particular as the past. It's the same sugary, teenaged-girl perfume that clouded the rec room parties and school gym dances of our youth, combined with something foul, something gone wrong. A neglected wound spritzed with Love's Baby Soft.The ghost of Ash, jealous of her brother's survival, had been successful in scaring away friends and lovers from his life, but when Danny meets a widow and her ten-year-old son, he determines that their love was worth finally confronting his dead twin for. As his attachment to them grows, so too does Ash's power over objects in the land of the living, and the stakes are raised even higher when Danny realises that he can't push Ash back to the Underworld; she must be pulled from within.
Author Andrew Pyper's view of the afterlife here is intriguing: Not quite heaven and hell, but definitely divided into the desirable and the not. When Danny died at 16, he relived the happiest day of his life; hanging out with his Dad, driving through the streets of Detroit and chatting in his office at GM headquarters. When he followed Ash into her ever after, though, the setting was still Detroit but bleaker: The buildings gutted and tumbling; people shuffling zombie-like around circumscribed areas; monstrous dangers stalking Danny through fog-shrouded streets. And there is danger in this Underworld -- it's possible to die again here, and every time one does, the setting is the same but worse; darker and fouler. It's interesting to me that Pyper, a Canadian, would use Detroit as the setting here, but even in the scenes set in modern day, the real abandoned residential buildings and dead downtown conjures the dangerous and the spooky. (And Pyper should be forgiven for using Detroit as a stand-in for hell when it's also Danny's heaven; a city that was once full of optimism and industry.)
So, the plot is more or less believable and intriguing, and with short, punchy sentences, I was drawn forward and read The Damned fairly quickly (but not in a oh-my-god-whats-going-to-happen-I-cant-put-this-down kind of a way). There were a disruptive amount of metaphors in this book, of varying degrees of effectiveness, and chapter openers often had an overwritten feel:
Dawn arrived on crimson clouds. From the bed, I watched it color the city in Martian hues before it lightened to orange, then pink, as if the day were deciding between a palette of alien options before it landed on the yellow sun of home…I watched the night pull off the skyline like a sheet.Essentially, this book comes down to characters, and as everyone else is pretty much window-dressing, it comes down to Danny and Ash (Danny briefly decided to really investigate his sister's death at one point and I found none of the hometown characters believable; they may have advanced the plot, but they were the weakest part of the book for me). Danny is a self-proclaimed introvert, which can make it hard to cheer for him, but there's enough of an underdog vibe to get the reader's sympathy. Ash is pure evil, which can be frustrating and strain credibility as her life story is revealed, but since there's a supernatural explanation for her behaviour, and that's true to the genre, she's believable in her own way. What elevates this book above a simple clash between good and evil is the fact that Danny and Ash are twins: He may have been afraid of her his whole life, but Danny can't help but feel connected to Ash (a connection he distinguishes from love); and Ash is single-mindedly focussed on Danny's destruction because of the connection (which isn't love or fraternity for her either). This interesting wrinkle is what makes this a three star instead of a two "just okay" star rating.
I haven't read Andrew Pyper before, and as I see that his The Demonologist was an award-winning book, I wouldn't be against giving it a try. More intriguingly, I see that his earlier (non-best-selling) books were considered more literary -- and I can totally understand why an author might become more mainstream (errybody's got bills), but I am even more interested in seeing what those books might be about.
Here's my limited experience of Detroit; that unfortunately-abandoned-former-center-of-industry:
When Dave and I got married (1991), we decided to honeymoon in the States, driving down to see Memphis, New Orleans and wherever else we ended up along the way. Leaving from London, we passed into Detroit fairly quickly, and we couldn't get through it fast enough for our liking. I don't really remember why our route (in those pre-GPS days) would have taken us through a residential area of the Motor City, but it was a really hot day and the fire hydrants were turned on, and as we drove down a street lined with brownstown-like townhouses, the stoops were crowded with folks staring daggers at us and even the little kids stood still at the edge of the hydrants' spray to watch warily as we drove past. It was spooky and hostile and we were glad to get back on the freeway.
Years later, at what was really the beginning of Detroit's decline (I'm thinking 2005 or 06), we drove down to Detroit to fly out of their airport on some vacation. It would have been January, and as we sped along the freeway towards the airport hotel, we could see a bunch of cars pulled off to either side of the road. Thinking it might be icy, Dave slowed down and then saw what the trouble was: couch-sized potholes that were blowing out everyone's tires and Dave slowly drove around them and got us to our hotel without incident. He was complaining about those potholes to someone at work when we got back and was told that Detroit had notoriously stopped fixing potholes: the city was dead broke.
Now today, Detroit is on the radar for all the dirt cheap mansions or factory buildings that a person might buy cheap, as in this article. I can't imagine a house like this (with "seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, 69 windows and a historic address") going for $1000, but on the other hand, I can't imagine feeling safe living in a big house in an abandoned neighbourhood:
And my last thought on Detroit: A few years ago -- the first time that Mallory was dreaming of seeing One Direction on tour and our local event was sold out -- I did happen to notice that there were excellent seats still available at the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit. The concert there would be on a Saturday night, and when I mused about it to Dave, saying that I could take Mal, he didn't think it sounded safe. I floated the idea past my virtual friend Susan (who lives outside Flint) and she said her husband won't go downtown Detroit at night. That explains the availability of tickets, I guess.
Poor old Detroit. This abandoned and dangerous vibe makes it a likely setting for a horror story, but I hope its residents understand that there is also a lot of affection for their city in The Damned; a nostalgia for its celebrated past; just as likely a setting for heaven on earth.
