Damned If You Do: A Novel [Paperback]

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 is Gordon Houghton is still here.

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...