The Suicide Collectors [Paperback]

David Oppegaard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 24, 2009

The Despair has plagued the earth for five years. Most of the world’s population has inexplicably died by its own hand, and the few survivors struggle to remain alive. A mysterious, shadowy group called the Collectors has emerged, inevitably appearing to remove the bodies of the dead. But in the crumbling state of Florida, a man named Norman takes an unprecedented stand against the Collectors, propelling him on a journey across North America. It’s rumored a scientist in Seattle is working on a cure for the Despair, but in a world ruled by death, it won’t be easy to get there.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Eloquent prose and haunting characters lift Oppegaar's astonishing debut, an SF thriller with some eerie similarities to M. Night Shyamala's film about mass suicide, The Happening. In the near future, 90% of the world's population have killed themselves due to a plague called the Despair. The only people energized by the nightmare are the Collectors, who after each suicide appear like carrion birds to collect the corpse. Only one man resists the Collectors. When the wife of a 34-year-old Floridian named Norman takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills, Norman loads his shotgun and waits patiently before blowing the head off a Collector who arrives to claim the body. Norman and his neighbor, Franklin Pops Conway, head for Seattle after learning a doctor there may have found a cure for the Despair. In Kansas, theyre joined by Zero, an 11-year-old girl whose bravery encourages Norman in his quest. While the story may be too bleak for many readers, the ending holds out some hope. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Reviewers were intrigued by the setup of Oppegaard's story and reasonably satisfied with the conclusion. The device of the Despair, they wrote, allows the author to use the best element of the postapocalyptic genre while keeping the story fresh. Critics were also clearly affected by the images that populate Oppegaard's sorrowful world: not just the grim gallery of ways people kill themselves but the many strategies they develop to deal with the aftermath. While no reviewer was completely happy with the plot's subsequent development, they still recommended the book and hoped to see more from Oppegaard soon.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; First Edition edition (November 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312586507
• ISBN-13: 978-0312586508
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,570,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Oppegaard is the author of the Bram Stoker nominated science fiction novel The Suicide Collectors and the newly released Wormwood, Nevada. David holds a B.A. in English Literature from St. Olaf College and an M.F.A. in Writing from Hamline University. A finalist for the Indiana Review Fiction Award and the Iowa Fiction Award, David has worked as an optician, a receptionist at the U of MN, a standardized test scorer, a farm hand, an editorial assistant, a trash picker for St. Paul public housing, a library circulation assistant, and as a child minder on a British cruise ship. He currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An impressive first novel but one that falls short at the end, July 26, 2009

By 

Whitt Patrick Pond "Whitt" (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Suicide Collectors (Hardcover)

David Oppegaard's The Suicide Collectors is a very impressive first novel, so much so that it was nominated for the prestigious Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. While it falls into a well known sub-category of speculative fiction, that of the road trip across a once-familiar country devastated by some calamity, Oppegaard makes it all fresh with memorable characters and with a unique and highly original premise for the calamity.

In Oppegaard's dystopia, the world has been plagued for the past five years by a mysterious phenomenon called The Despair, an affliction of unknown origins and unknown transmission that has somehow driven over ninety percent of the world's population to commit suicide. Added to this devastating phenomenon is the simultaneous appearance of the "suicide collectors" of the title, mysterious silent black-robed people that somehow always show up whenever someone commits suicide, taking the bodies away to no one knows where.

Norman, a man who loses his wife to suicide at the novel's opening, upsets things by killing one of the Collectors when they come for his wife's body. The road trip begins when Norman and the only other survivor in their small Florida town, a elderly Mr. Fixit neighbor named Pops, take off for Seattle on the rumor that a community still thrives there and that a scientist there is working on a cure for The Despair. The trip, and the memorable characters they meet and pick up on the way, most notably a young girl named Zero, are what really drive the best part of the novel.

On the plus side, Oppegaard's style reads quite well and the pace never lags. You come to care about the characters, and the world is presented in a highly visual way so that you truly feel immersed in the world and in everything that is happening. And his landscape is filled with memorable characters and images. I found this one particularly compelling:

"They approached the house covered in feathers and saw it wasn't really covered in feathers at all, but paper. Sheet after sheet of paper. Each piece was nailed to the house like a collection of religious tracts, or shingles. The paper sheets flapped with the breeze so that the house appeared to be breathing.
'Holy cow,' Zero said. 'Somebody's been busy.'
Norman stepped closer to the house. She was right. Someone had written on each sheet of paper not by hand, or computer, but with an old-fashioned typewriter. Norman grasped a sheet at random and read...
Norman grabbed another sheet...
Zero was reading the lowest row of papers around the house's foundation. 'They keep talking about their parents and their brother and their sister,' Zero said, glancing back at Norman. 'It's so sad.' Norman walked around to the back of the house. The windows had all been boarded up and sheets of paper had been nailed into the boards, too....
'It's a suicide letter, isn't it?'
'The whole thing,' Zero said. 'The whole house. It's one big suicide letter.' "

For the most part, the novel is a great read. There were one or two places where I felt the characters didn't act realistically, but the real problem I had with the novel was at the end. Without giving anything away, I can say that what should have been the climactic scene seemed to happen off-screen, leaving the reader left hanging and feeling like they missed something vital to the story. It also leaves the reader with important questions unanswered, which is also frustrating. For this reason, I can only give it 4 stars instead of 5. That said, it's definitely worth reading and I very much look forward to seeing what Oppegaard will come up with in his next novel.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Haunting Story That Makes You Think., January 9, 2010

By 

C. Brunner (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Suicide Collectors (Kindle Edition)

This novel was so polished and well written. I waited for six months before I bought this book, because the price was so expensive. After reading it, I am struck with how moving it was. The saying that it goes out with not a bang but a wimper really describes this book. Norman is a man who lives through an epidemic of almost everyone he knows committing suicide. The book begins with his wife's suicide, which starts off a chain of events throughout the rest of the book. They have managed to live through the despair for a few years. Norman refuses to let the collectors, which are a group of people who collect the dead, take his wife. In the process, he kills one of them. He is the only person up to this point to have done so. This starts him off on a journey to Seattle to find the cure. The central theme to this novel is hope. Norman is a ray of hope in a word that is cut off from hope. As someone who has had depression her entire life, I found this novel haunting and beautiful. It spoke to me. This is an author to watch. I gave it 4 stars because the ending was not expanded as well as I would have liked, but I understand why the ending was the way it was.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't look for a neatly wrapped, dumbed down Hollywood ending here, November 12, 2009

By 

W. V. Buckley (Kansas City, MO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Suicide Collectors (Kindle Edition)

Most books in the post-apocalyptic road trip genre - Stephen King's The Stand, for example - are massive books that contain so many characters and settings you almost have to come up with a flow chart to keep track of the action. David Oppegaard takes a very different route and delivers a much shorter novel with only three main characters. The stripped-down plot allows for an intimate, more stylized portrait of life after The Despair, a sort of epidemic of depression and suicide that has claimed 90 percent of the world's population. Were there times when I was frustrated by the lack of details about the crumbling world nearly devoid of humans? Of course. But at the same time I realized that the minimal approach taken by Oppegaard allows for the experience and flashbacks of Norman, his handyman neighbor Pops and 9-year-old Zero to become prisms through which the world is reflected.

A number of comments have been made about the ending of this book. Though I don't want to give anything away, I will say that the story ends rather ambiguously. In this respect it reminds me of the John Sayles film, "Limbo." That film ends with the shot of a small plane returning to an Alaskan island where two adults and a child have become stranded. But does the plane bring rescue? Or are the drug dealer bad guys on board and waiting for the opportunity to wipe out the witnesses? The movie doesn't answer that question. Instead, it becomes a sort of litmus test for how we view the world: People are basically good and will rescue us in time of trouble or people are basically bad and can't be trusted.

I greatly enjoyed this book (if one can truly enjoy a book in which so many suicides are so prominently featured). The ambiguous ending seemed effective to me because it lingers longer in one's mind than a neatly wrapped, dumbed down Hollywood ending.