Feeling a bit too optimistic as of late? Thinking that nothing can get you down? Try David Oppegaard’s THE SUICIDE COLLECTORS on for size! It’ll get you back to earth like the rest of us.
It’s set in a future in which the apocalypse took the form of “The Despair,” an overwhelming urge among 90 percent of the world’s population to commit suicide. Our hero, Norman, and his wife are managing to survive in a slowly dwindling Florida community, when she finally gives into the suicidal despair that’s infected nearly everyone else. One note about these suicides: When people off themselves, the relatives aren’t allowed to bury the bodies — vehicles with strangely garbed creatures called “Collectors” show up soon after to take the corpse somewhere. So the Collectors show up to take Norman’s spouse, and he’s got no time for complicated plot devices — he just wastes them with a shotgun and buries his bride.
With that, Norman and an old man are the only folks left in town, and they decide to go on a cross-country, post-apocalyptic road trip to Seattle, to see if rumors of a cure are real. Along the way, it becomes fairly obvious that the Collectors are on his tail, and as they wind their way across the U.S. of A., they pick up a little girl named Zero as a traveling companion, and see the varied ways in which Oppegaard’s “new normal” has changed the fabric of society.
Up to this point, THE SUICIDE COLLECTORS is a fantastic, imaginative, well-paced (if extremely depressing) book. Oppegaard knows his way around a blank page — he writes real pretty, even when writing about suicides and car chases and shotguns. The characters are by no means standard-issue, and their motivations seem real and true.
But it falls apart in the third act. Right when you think it’s going to get really good, the plot sort of fizzles out in an extremely uneventful and informative, but strangely dull climax. I have no idea how this could’ve occurred. Up until there, everything was going great! What happened? Ending the book with none of the mysteries solved would have been more satisfying than this.
For Oppegaard to have built such a cool premise (even if at the start, it seems really, really like the movie THE HAPPENING) and great post-apocalyptic setting and then basically waste everything invested in that process with a dud conclusion is a crying shame. As a first novel, though, THE SUICIDE COLLECTORS is better than most. Read it for the setting and the characters, not necessarily the plot. —Ryun Patterson
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It sounds pretty good. I might give it a try even with the ending being less than great.
But after your review of “Goodnight Moon,” I have to ask this. Are you sure this isn’t just similar to The Happening? Maybe it’s the novelization to that movie and you’re just confused. Or maybe you were doing a crossword puzzle and just imagined that you read this book.
There goes my credibility as an amateur reviewer of genre fiction.