Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

Book Overview

'Required reading' - Neil Gaiman. A corpse is resurrected and apprenticed to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for seven days. During the course of the week, he tries to remember how he died,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312262884
• ISBN13: 9780312262884
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Darker Douglas Adams

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 i

Wistfully Surreal Slapstick

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...

Are you dead?

A quote on the back cover is "Should be required reading for all dead people." I concur.

Wacky black comedy

Blackly comic, British author Gordon Houghton's "Damned If You Do" explores the business of Death - and Famine and Pestilence and War - as the narrator, a corpse roused from his coffin to assist Death, spends a week in the seedy London rowhouse headquarters of the four horsemen (or "drivers" as they call themselves in the age of the automobile). With each new day and death he remembers more of his own life and violent end.Death's previous assistant, Hades, died in one of the few ways available to immortals - a violent evisceration - and the circumstances are shrouded in mystery, not that his replacement cares much at first. Selected by lot, corpse 72 18 9 11 12 13 49 is a reluctant zombie, longing for the quiet uneventfulness of his grave, then with increasing alertness, for life. His own time ended at age 28, suddenly, in a fall from a roof. He remembers the panic, the disbelief, the instant of knowledge and not much more.But each day, Death requires his assistance in one fatal act. At the end of the week he can choose his own return to the grave from one of these: a fall from a great height, poisoned candy, a misfortunate series of accidents, death by machine, death by insects, asphyxiation, skinning. Each one more gruesome than the one before, each pointless, having the same end.Death himself takes no pleasure in his work but methodically follows directives from the Chief, a faceless, possibly malicious, possibly nonexistent director whose files the narrator peruses as the mishaps and failures of his life resolve in greater detail in his mind, along with moments of love, sadness and waste. As his life - and death - unfolds inside him, filling out his memories, he begins to have opinions about the work. War and Pestilence enjoy their jobs, striving for greater mayhem and inventive agony, respectively. Famine is merely humorless and lugubrious, Death is bored.Wacky, pointed, sinister and satirical, Houghton's novel moves at a brisk, grisly pace. Yet, as the zombie protagonist quickens, the narrative clings to hope and, well, life, in all its imperfections. Though Houghton's first novel, "The Dinner Party," has not been published in the US, his sharp observations and spare, colorful prose make him a writer to watch.

Silly to serious

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?