By: By Matthew Jackson

HUNTSVILLE —     Chuck Palahniuk, author of cult classics like “Fight Club” and “Choke,” is known for taking broad and often taboo concepts and morphing them into playful, shocking tales that challenge our understanding of civilized life. With “Damned,” he goes further conceptually than he’s ever gone before, creating one of his bravest books that – even when it misses the mark – still packs a punch.
    Madison is 13, and she’s just landed in hell. She died, she thinks, from a marijuana overdose. She sits in her cell, watching rivers of excrement roll by (no, really), contemplating her millionaire parents, her social awkwardness and the boy she had a crush on before she left the world of the living. She meets a few friends: a jock, a pretty girl, an angst-ridden outsider and a nerd. It’s “The Breakfast Club” meets “Dante’s Inferno,” and as the novel wears on Palahniuk makes it even more than a clever pop culture analogy.
    Madison’s adventures in hell traverse everything from the sexual preferences of giant demons to how telemarketers often originate from the very pits of Satan. It’s equal parts funny and shocking, and it’s all helped along by Madison’s playful, melancholy voice. Palahniuk is famous for his first person narratives, and with Madison he’s found a character that he can once again master, even if she is a 13-year-old girl.
    The only downside of “Damned” is that sometimes Palahniuk seems to be trying a little too hard. Some of the themes he’s trafficking in here are clichés, like the idea of calls from telemarketers originating from a phone bank in hell, that he’s deliberately trying to treat in some new and amusing way, and most of the time it works. But there are times when it seems he’s going the extra mile just to shock, and it doesn’t always serve the story. Palahniuk has always been that kind of writer, but this time it seems he’s going deeper simply because he’s literally in hell, and he wants to make the most of it.
    That aside, “Damned” remains an enormously entertaining book that’s part Jean-Paul Sartre, part John Hughes, a trippy adventure into a literal abyss of teen angst, corporate worship, greed and power. Chuck Palahniuk remains the great American literary trickster god.
    Damned is available in bookstores everywhere Oct. 18.