Madison Spencer, the liveliest and snarkiest dead girl in the universe, continues the afterlife adventure begun in Chuck Palahniuk’s bestseller Damned. Just as that novel brought us a brilliant Hell that only he could imagine, Doomed is a dark and twisted apocalyptic vision from this provocative storyteller.

The bestselling Damned chronicled Madison’s journey across the unspeakable (and really gross) landscape of the afterlife to confront the Devil himself. But her story isn’t over yet. In a series of electronic dispatches from the Great Beyond, Doomed describes the ultimate showdown between Good and Evil.
     After a Halloween ritual gone awry, Madison finds herself trapped in Purgatory—or, as mortals like you and I know it, Earth. She can see and hear every detail of the world she left behind, yet she’s invisible to everyone who’s still alive. Not only do people look right through her, they walk right through her as well. The upside is that, no longer subject to physical limitations, she can pass through doors and walls. Her first stop is her parents’ luxurious apartment, where she encounters the ghost of her long-deceased grandmother. For Madison, the encounter triggers memories of the awful summer she spent upstate with Nana Minnie and her grandfather, Papadaddy. As she revisits the painful truth of what transpired over those months (including a disturbing and finally fatal meeting in a rest stop’s fetid men’s room, in which . . . well, never mind), her saga of eternal damnation takes on a new and sinister meaning. Satan has had Madison in his sights from the very beginning: through her and her narcissistic celebrity parents, he plans to engineer an era of eternal damnation. For everyone.
     Once again, our unconventional but plucky heroine must face her fears and gather her wits for the battle of a lifetime. Dante Alighieri, watch your back; Chuck Palahniuk is gaining on you.

**

From Booklist

Damned (2011) introduced us to 13-year-old Madison Spencer, newly arrived in Hell after her death; as she tried to figure out what exactly happened to her, she took us on an exciting and often very funny tour of Hell. Now, in the sequel, Madison is back on Earth, stranded there on Halloween, facing the prospect of spending an entire year as (shudder) a ghost among the living. Although not quite as entertaining as Damned—primarily because it lacks the first book’s hellish travelogue—the novel nicely continues Madison’s story, filling in a lot of the blanks in her life (we find out, for example, the real reason why she’s been damned) and exposing an ancient satanic plot that—believe it or not—has poor little Madison at its center. As with the first book, this one lives or dies on the appeal of its teenage narrator. On the face of it, Spencer isn’t the most likable of girls: she’s self-centered, in-your-face, and almost too aggressively clever for her own good—but so was Holden Caulfield. She’s a compelling character, and she drives a novel that will resonate from the get-go with Palahniuk’s many fans. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Palahniuk’s 12 novels have sold more than five million copies in the U.S. His latest will profit from both traditional print publicity and an extensive social-media campaign. --David Pitt

Review

Praise for DOOMED:
''If you only read one book this year about a dead teenager posting on message boards about playing supernaturalist and tempting Satan's wrath, let it be this one.'' --Kirkus Reviews

''The novel nicely continues Madison's story, filling in a lot of the blanks in her life (we find out, for example, the real reason why she's been damned) and exposing an ancient satanic plot that - believe it or not - has poor little Madison at its center . . . She's a compelling character, and she drives a novel that will resonate from the get-go with Palahniuk's many fans.'' --Booklist

Praise for Damned:
''A far sunnier work than either author or location would suggest. . . . His more mordant satire is reserved for the living, focusing, as ever, on our manic solipsism and affectless self-regard; and in this novel in particular on our refusal to look death and ageing in the eye, and the materialistic tactics we use to distract ourselves from the void.'' --The Guardian (UK)
''Crisp and entertaining . . . this is a winning and funny book.'' --The Washington Post
''Damned combines elements of Judy Bloom's coming-of-age classic, Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, with Dante's Divine Comedy, with a heavy infusion of the 1980s classic The Breakfast Club.'' --Wall Street Journal ****

1835-ben ​​egy ember gyönyörű álommal ajándékozta meg a világot: a legújabb távcső állítólagos felfedezései nyomán egy cikksorozatban megírta, hogy a sűrű erdőkkel teli Holdon unikornisok, denevéremberek és más fantasztikus lények élnek a legnagyobb idillben. S bár hamar kiderült, hogy az egész csak egy leleményes csalás volt, sokan továbbra is szerettek a Holdról álmodni… meg a határtalan, barátságos világűr egyéb csodáiról.

Több mint hetven évvel később a csaló ükunokája, a gyönyörűséges Emma Harlow le akarja rázni egyik udvarlóját, a dúsgazdag, de csöppet sem rokonszenves Montgomery Gilmore-t. Csak akkor tudná szeretni, mondja neki, ha a valóságban lemásolná a marslakók invázióját, ahogyan azt H. G. Wells megírta a
című könyvében. Lehetetlen feladat… de Gilmore számára nem létezik lehetetlen.

És a marslakók megtámadják a földet…
Félix J. Palma 1968-ban született. Több, a hazájában, Spanyolországban sikeres elbeszéléskötetek után viktoriánus trilógiájával egy csapásra a világot is meghódította. Az első kötet, az
magyarul 2011-ben jelent meg, s most itt a második, amelynek főhőse megint csak H. G. Wells, aki ezúttal nemcsak az időben utazik, hanem az univerzumok között is.

2013-ban elnyerte az Ignotus-díjat, amelyet a Spanyol Sci-fi- és Horrorszerzők Szövetsége ítél oda minden évben a legjobb regénynek a műfajban.

S hisszük vagy sem, hogy az időutazás lehetséges, és hogy Wells egy párhuzamos világból küld üzenetet nekünk, annyi bizonyos, hogy Félix J. Palma elvisz minket a saját időutazására: a viktoriánus Anglia izgalmas világába.