As Promised, here is the first book I read in the October Offensive promotion by Strangehouse Books!
“Everyone experiences Hell in their own special way…”
Highschool is hell, between the cliques, the homework, and the obnoxious teachers high school can really be a place of torment for a lot of people. Now imagine a high school IN hell……
Damnation 101 by Mr. Kevin Sweeney was rather entertaining. I will admit right off the bat that I skipped the first three pages. I am not preachy with my inability to read rape so I’ll just leave you with if you have a less than capable mind to read the brutal rape scene in the beginning I would skip it but not the whole book. The book as a whole is def. worth the read and picks up with the humor quite quickly. First author to be able to take torture and rape (which are not my forte) and write it in such way that makes it easier to bear and digest with the witty dialogue and the tongue and cheek reactions.
In Damnation 101, the demons, ghouls, and monsters of Hell have got their work cut out for them. Humans have had it all wrong for centuries with their religious beliefs and because of this every single human on the planet goes to Hell when they die. It becomes apparent that there are not enough torturers in Hell to keep up with the overflow of humans that are making their way into eternal damnation. Eternal damnation can only be eternal if there is enough “man” power to pass along. One solution is to implore humans to do the torturing on other humans. So a few select are chosen as a sort of experiment to see if any humans have what it takes to inflict eternal pain on their species. Zsa Zsa, our main character is chosen for this very task. .
My favorite construction of this story is getting to go back and see what each student did to land them in detention. Each side story is really well written and entertaining and for such a short book you get a lot of back story to each character. Just like in any high school, Hell’s detention is filled with an eclectic bunch of rule breakers. But the rules that they break is not your average detention worthy crime. We have the Imp; Bibbidibobbidibu, Bibi for short who opens up our story with a rather disturbing rape scene, a Demon by the name of El Pandejo who is hiding a deliciously sinister secret (a super silly secret), the Fallen Angel with an incredible sex drive and a cock to match, and representing Mankind we have Zsa Zsa, who since having a less than happy upbringing by her abusive father all her life, fit the bill quite well to withstanding the tortures of Hell.
After they tell their sides we then get to see what they end up doing once they are out of detention and functioning as horrific demons that terrorize the human race, we get a taste of what they learned and how they have progressed which I thought was wonderfully clever.
I loved when Zsa Zsa is reading the books in the library and makes mention of bizarro writers basically writing crap and trying to top the next violent gory author. It gave me a giggle being someone who genuinely enjoys the bizarro genre and has read quite a bit of it lately in the past year.
The play on The Breakfast Club was just enough without stealing the entire template and just plugging and chugging a story along. It’s very original in it’s delivery and comically hilarious with it’s spoof on the beloved 80’s movie.
MEET THE AUTHOR: KEVIN SWEENEY (photo and bio courtesy of Strangehousebooks.com
Kevin Sweeney is the author of over a dozen books, often under other names, including the Sideshow P.I. series with Nathanial Lambert, as well as The Pornographer-General, Smut and Trash, and The Bee-atches. He lives in merry old England with his partner Pinky, who can attest that he is not as much of a cunt as all the evidence would otherwise suggest.
