(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) It's never fun to be standing in a queue at 3.30 am, but sometimes you have no choice. You're at an airport in a long, slow-moving immigration queue, and the only saving grace is a book in your bag, a supposed thriller called The Damned.
The first 40 pages of The Damned make the queue easier to bear. The plot about an evil twin, Ash, back from the dead, to haunt her brother, Danny is a welcome distraction. You've been granted a pastime other than stifling yawns, and shifting body weight from one foot to the other, and exhaling into the ears of the person ahead of you.
The book starts with Danny saying he's died more than once in his life. The second time he dies is on his and Ash's 16th birthday in a house that burned down. Danny the survivor 'comes back', while Ash goes on to linger in the twilight zone, and make Danny's life hell.
Ash was a meanie even when she was alive - "vicious psychopath", her brother called her. She once drove a power tool into some poor chap's hand and ripped off two of his fingers, blood squirting everywhere... All this "with seductive ease". Another time, affable Ash drove an icicle ("long and sharp as shears") that she had stored for weeks in the freezer, into the skull of their dog, a stray yellow lab named Sid that their dad had brought home from the animal shelter.
Death does nothing to soften Ash's core. She keeps dropping in to visit Danny from hell/ twilight waiting room/ wherever she hangs when she's not being a spooky pest. He sees visions of her - something moving in the shadows, a pungent smell in the corridors, a whiff of a sticky girly perfume, a voice or a cackle only he hears, etc, etc. She torments him, whispers things like "Time's up, Danny." and "Who, Danny, who, who..." So much so that even after two decades of her being dead, Danny has no friends, no girlfriends, no life. Ash wouldn't allow it, apparently. And he
accepts his fate. Danny is The Damned, and after a 100 pages, you begin to feel like he deserves it.
Up to a point, the narrative holds fine. Or, at least for readers somewhat open-minded about life-after-death theories, it seems to hold fine. Only midway does the plot go completely bonkers.
For one, the repetitiveness and predictable patterns of Ash's ghostly diva appearances become a joke. The long descriptions and terse sentences don't help. Eg: Page 103, 104 and 105, are about hissing nylon sleeves. "The sleeve I had been holding reached all the way out of the drum. A hiss of nylon as it extended its full length, then suspended itself a foot over the floor. Nothing for a time. Like it was thinking. A snake waiting for its prey to walk by. Then it moved. A round bulge made its way down the sleeve on the inside like a reverse swallow.
Something appeared from the hole of the wristband at the end. Hard-knobbed, gray-nailed, but most of it black, shining wet in spots. It paused as though making sure it had complete attention. Then it came out all the way. A burnt human hand emerging to crack its fingers wide. hypnotised by the hand. Its swaying cobra-head dance. Now the other sleeve joined its twin..."
Honestly, trudging through some of the parts of The Damned is more excruciating than being stuck in a queue that seems to not move.
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