The Suicide Collectors

The Suicide Collectors by David Oppegaard         Oppegard's debut novel takes a familiar genre trope - the post-apocalyptic road-trip - and adds some welcome kinks.  To start with, there are no zombies, nor radiation-addled mutants, nor roving bands of cannibals.  What ended the civilized world was something simultaneously much more mundane, and more chilling: a rash of suicides that has left the world at something around a tenth of its population.  His characters are less magically immune to this inexplicable phenomenon than simply stubborn, weary men and women that nonetheless cling to life, more as an act of defiance than for any particular goal.  Survival in this particular apocalypse is less a matter of finding how to survive - no zombies to fight, no precious resources to husband - but more a matter of finding a reason why.     Oppegaard lays out this new world with stunning efficiency in the first few chapters as we're introduced to the last two members of a small Florida town; Norman, who loses his wife to the suicidal impulse that has swept the globe in the opening pages, and Pops, who lost his much earlier.  They talk; they drink; they mourn those lost; they don't do a whole lot of anything, because there's really not much point, anymore.  But there's an even darker turn to this despair ravaged world - a group of people known as Collectors who claim the dead, carting them off to parts unknown if they're not put in the ground immediately.  Norman, in his grief, takes umbrage at the very knowledge that they're going to collect his wife, and waits by her body with his loaded shotgun.  In the chaos that ensues, Norman and Pops have angered the last true power in the world, and it's road trip time - from Florida to Seattle, where a fabled Despair-free zone might await.     The Suicide Collectors settles in quickly to an epsodic format after that, chronicling both Norman and Pops' adventures through a despair-ravaged America, and branching off to tell the stories of others who have found a reason to survive.  It's in these middle stretches that Oppegaard hits his stride, crafting frighteningly plausible reactions to an America hanging under a cloud of constant suicide while simultaneously mining a rich vein of dark humor to be had in a world abandoned by hope.  And while I won't spoil the latter half of the book, suffice it to say that Oppegaard is not afraid to rock the boat of his narrative, swapping back and forth between light social commentary, tense thriller, and a kind of bleak humanism that does his supremely likeable characters justice.   -Drew