Nobody Owens is a normal boy, except that he has been raised by ghosts and other denizens of the graveyard.

"Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison," declares the whip-tongued thirteen-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in...

Laylee, thirteen, is nearly worn out from washing and packaging corpses for the Otherwhere and being shunned by villagers when two strangers, Alice and Oliver, arrive determined to help.