THE GRATEFUL DAMNED

A man descends into the underworld on a strange odyssey to find his late bride in Blunk’s wacky satire.

When high school English teacher Sherwood “Woody” McCormick’s wife Abbie dies in a plane crash only one day after their wedding, Woody is left reeling and seeking answers about fate, the universe, and the nature of God. He turns to lonely waitresses, unorthodox preachers, and psychics eager to shake him down before an Angel appears and intervenes. “You’ve not been searching for God. You’ve been searching for your late wife,” the heavenly figure informs him before offering Woody an unbelievable opportunity: Woody will be allowed to visit hell in an effort to find Abbie and get some closure on her untimely death. In a flash, Woody is hurled into a mass of deceased people receiving their orientation at the Greater Babylonian Civic Center, where a flashy emcee proclaims that hell is actually a fantastic place—in fact, it’s “the only place to be.” Far from the fire and brimstone pits of popular imagination, Woody discovers that hell is actually a buzzing, endless metropolis with an inscrutable economy (everything only costs one “Tetzel,” which is simultaneously worth everything and nothing), a false promise of eternal youth, and fancy seven-course dinners that never truly satisfy. Countless kooky characters start to come out of the woodwork offering to guide Woody through this strange alternate reality. Among them, Woody meets the smoke-breathing Nancy McGill, the seductive Vanya Subramanian and her daughter Prissy (who is, in fact, a giant frog), and a sex worker with a heart of gold and an extreme case of halitosis named Exie. Unsure of who to trust, Woody finds himself adrift in a topsy-turvy world where the price he might have to pay for what he wants is himself.

Blunk’s modern-day Orpheus story is bursting with clever ideas and quirky characters that jump off the page in rapid succession, calling to mind the numerous idiosyncratic figures populating the works of Kurt Vonnegut, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In the same vein, Woody’s journey is epic in both scale and absurdity. Here, hell is an exaggerated American mega-city with an endless sprawl of traffic, dizzying skyscrapers, and distressing urban decay that gets summed up by Exie as “nothing more than a pigsty with crosstown subway service.” The book’s satirical barbs seem to be aimed at pretentious city dwellers who barter in delusions of grandeur. (Hell’s bogus economic system is probably Blunk’s most ingenious idea, as it sets up plenty of wonderful jokes and bigger, philosophical notions about value.) But, with so many characters and ideas vying for attention, the author’s point gets lost in the cacophony. There is hardly a moment to understand or sympathize with Woody as a protagonist before he is thrown, at a breakneck pace, from one outrageous situation to the next. At the same time, his strangely passive responses and infuriating naïveté will leave readers feeling as disoriented as he is; is the joke supposed to be on him or on the numerous ghouls that are trying to take him for a ride? Blunk’s whirlwind tour of hell ultimately offers more confusion than answers, but there are plenty of surprising and fun stops along the way.

A vision of hell with many inventive creations that ultimately overwhelms rather than impresses.