Book Review: “The Damned” by Andrew Pyper
Sibling Rivalry
Andrew Pyper’s The Damned is a novel that has been sitting in my To Be Read pile for more than eight years. I have to apologize to the publisher for not doing anything with this book for so long, especially since they went to the expense and trouble to mail me a physical copy. I was supposed to review it for a friend’s book blog at the time, but a few factors prevented me from doing so. One, I was broke back then — and was probably starting to look for any paying work I could get in my free time. Two, I had just ended a relationship with a popular webzine, so my heart might have just not been in it. And, three, I got through perhaps a quarter of the novel, and I just wasn’t liking what I was reading. That last point is strange because when I re-read those chapters now in 2023, I was struck by the fact that the book wasn’t as bad as I seemed to remember it as being. To be true, The Damned is a pulpy, trashy book in some respects — even if Kirkus Reviews called it “intelligent.” I suppose if I had a problem with the novel when it was originally released in hardcover in 2015, it might have been one of some unmet expectations. I had read Pyper’s earlier work, Lost Girls, which is an excellent Canadian legal thriller. I still remember parts of that novel to this day, some 25 or so years after the fact from its publication. I guess that means I wasn’t expecting a supernatural thriller from this Canadian author, and you could say that expectations should have been damned. (I’m trying to make a bad joke here.)
The Damned is focused on two twins named Danny and Ashleigh Orchard, who live in Detroit, Michigan, during the late 1980s. It turns out that Ashleigh has a penchant for doing evil things, and — perhaps as punishment for those she has hurt — is killed on her 16th birthday in an abandoned house fire under mysterious circumstances. Danny almost perishes in the same fire when he goes to rescue her but winds up having a Near Death Experience instead. He turns that experience into a bestselling book, and becomes something of a celebrity in the process. However, when Danny finally meets the woman whom he will marry and her 10-year-old son from a previous relationship years later, Ashleigh finds a way to bridge the gap between the Afterlife and the Real World and sets about haunting Danny and his new family. Without really knowing what to do, Danny sets out to try to stop Ashleigh from taking over his and his family’s life.
The Damned is the type of book that works best if you don’t think about it too much. After all, it was unclear to me what Ashleigh’s beef against Danny really was — except for the fact that she’s the embodiment of pure teenage evil and that’s probably only reason enough to turn her into something of a threat. To be sure, this novel is simply just good ol’ fashioned escapist fun — the kind of book that a Stephen King might set about writing. However, it is not without its faults. While not being an entire wash-out as I originally thought (and perhaps my views were being coloured by my living situation at the time when I first sat down to read this), the last third of the novel exists entirely on dream logic and can be confusing to follow at times. As well, I wanted to know more about Danny’s living situation with his new wife and son. We don’t get to see a lot of them in the novel, which is strange because the marriage and the relationship are the triggers for Ashleigh’s re-emergence into the life of Danny. Questions may remain with the reader about the entire motivation for Danny’s sister’s behaviour years after her death.
However, I don’t want to sound like the guy yelling at kids to get off of his front lawn. Pyper is something of a respected writer in Canadian circles. He’s won awards and his work has been optioned by Hollywood, so, to that end, you can’t fault him for writing escapist entertainment — and that’s something everyone needs to read from time to time. The writing is pretty good for a book of this ilk, and I may just have a bias against supernatural thrillers because when Stephen King has mined the genre as well as he has, anything that follows in his footsteps is bound to feel second-rate. So, the odds may have been stacked against a novel of this ilk from the get-go. Still, there are things to admire here: I must admit that the book’s setting of Detroit offers ample opportunity to write about the death of the American Dream. Overall, though, the results seem rather middling at best. I do wish the book had established a little more in the way of logic for each character’s motivation. I also found it odd that Danny never tried to contact a spirit medium to solve his problems — especially since the only way he can reach out to his sister is by having another Near Death Experience. So, yeah, you do have to turn your brain off for this one. However, if the genre is appealing to you and you want to read a Canadian author whose work could be characterized as wide-ranging, this is not a terrible book to read. (Although I would really want to point first-time readers of Pyper to Lost Girls, as that’s an excellent book.) The Damned is simply a dynamic quick-to-read novel for those who like their fiction to go down easy. I’m just sorry, again, to the publicity team at Simon & Schuster for taking so long to reach that conclusion.
Andrew Pyper’s The Damned was published by Simon & Schuster on February 9, 2016.
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