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Hades is dead and the Agency needs a replacement, a new apprentice to carry on its good work. After a vote, corpse number 72 18 9 11 12 13 49 is selected and promptly yanked from his grave, to serve a seven day trial sentence. Each day our hapless narrator is to assist Death in the killing of one unfortunate soul, but as he encounters each victim, and as he begins to grasp the functions of Death and the other three modern-day Horsemen, he begins to unlock strange memories of his own prior life. It is not until he understands the backhanded politics of the Four Horsemen's run-down row house, and the sinister circumstances of his predecessor's demise, that he can recognize his true purpose in, well, er, life...
- Sales Rank: #4401385 in Books
- Published on: 2000-07-07
- Released on: 2000-07-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .68" w x 5.50" l, .71 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
- ISBN13: 9780312262884
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
Death isn't all it's cracked up to be in Houghton's very British novel. In fact, Death is a haggard and disillusioned bureaucrat, who has long ago stopped pondering the chief's ultimate vision even as he goes about his grisly business: pushing a depressed woman off a building, setting army ants on innocent lovers and dismembering the passenger of a carnival ride in a bizarre accident. Along with his companions, War, Famine and Pestilence, the paper-pushing grim reaper rents office space in Oxford, England. The four employ a general assistant, the punky, ambitious Skirmish, but Death's personal assistant has just been eviscerated, so Death resurrects a deceased private detective to take his place. The novel is told from this unnamed zombie's point of view. As the zombie assists Death on his rounds, he has to get reacquainted with mobility, digestion and excretion. He's in rather good shape, actually, save for a missing penis and a particularly scrawny physique. Over the course of his week with Death, he copes with memories of his former life, many of them centering on Amy, the love of his life, who married someone else. Only after he became a private investigator did they meet again, when, coincidentally, Amy asked him to run an investigation on her abusive husband. In between dealing out plague-infected chocolates and looking up files, the zombie finally remembers the manner of his death. At the end of the week, Death discharges him, which usually means a return to corpsehood. But then the zombie challenges him to a game of chess. Houghton's dark riffs are amusing, but the novel's big extended joke gets a little tired before the end. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Demonstrating a comic style reminiscent of both Nick Hornby and Monty Python, Houghton's novel is a funny, if sometimes sophomoric, look at death in all of its absurd forms. In an Oxford cemetery, the unnamed male narrator, who recently died at age 28, awakes from his eternal rest and discovers that he has been randomly selected to be Death's assistant for a week. Each day, the narrator accompanies Death around town on assignments. Poisoned chocolates, ravenous ants, a ludicrous chain of clumsy accidents--each of the seven days explores a new manner of kicking off. These events are interwoven with the narrator's memories of his own final days of life, when he worked as a somewhat hapless private investigator. Much of the novel's humor resides in the interplay among Death and the other three apocalyptic horsemen, War, Pestilence, and Famine, a quarrelsome, disorganized bunch. When the death gags start to die down about halfway through, Houghton wisely breathes life into a suspenseful subplot, as the narrator's apprenticeship nears its close. James Klise
From Kirkus Reviews
A brash and often gruesomely funny debut novel from England, offering the first-person testimony of a zombie.The nameless narrator is the loser in a lottery held by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Death, Famine, Pestilence, and War) to find a successor to Hades, Death's assistant, who has been assassinated. Removed from his grave in Oxford, where he has been residing comfortably, if without much stimulation, for several years, our hero learns that he is to be given a tryout, lasting for one week, during which he'll accompany Death on his rounds. If he fails, he'll be sent back to his grave for good. Pythonesque slapstick abounds in subsequent developments. Despite their grisly looks, the Horsemen are more like squabbling career bureaucrats than supernatural figures. They've given up horses in favor of battered cars. They use computers to track their clients. They tend to blame each other when their assignments go wrong—as they often do. An attempt to release a new plague germ during a screening of (what else?) Bergman's The Seventh Seal fails, and Death greatly annoys the audience by laughing uproariously at his portrayal on screen. The Four Horsemen constantly try to outmaneuver each other and impress ‘The Chief,’ who is never seen and communicates only through terse memos. Over the course of his trial week, the narrator begins to recover his past: he was a private investigator, murdered by his lover's husband. Musings on his adoration of this woman, and on his otherwise unremarkable life, tend to be lengthy and tiresome. But his desperate scheme to quit the Horsemen and reenter life—which involves (of course) challenging Death to a chess match—is rather touching.Uneven, hectic, sometimes decidedly adolescent. Nonetheless, the author gets points for audacity, and for reinventing the Four Horsemen as a perpetual vaudeville act. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Boyle
I have read this book five times!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A Darker Douglas Adams
By Brian Bagnall
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 is Gordon Houghton is still here.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Wacky black comedy
By Lynn Harnett
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.
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