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.
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
"In "Ichthyology," a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the boy's observations of his tropical fish, yet also reveals his father's last desperate moves, including quitting dentistry for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. "Rhoda" goes back to the beginning of the father's second marriage and the boy's fascination with his stepmother, who has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can't yet see into, including sexuality and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father's eventual suicide. "A Legend of Good Men" tells the story of the boy's life with his mother after his father's death through the series of men she dates." "In "Sukkwan Island," an extraordinary novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern Alaskan wilderness. As the situation spins out of control, the son witnesses his father's despair and takes matters into his own hands. In "Ketchikan," the boy is now thirty years old, searching for the origin of ruin. He tracks down Gloria, the woman his father first cheated with, and is left with the sense of "a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all." Set in Fairbanks, where the author's father actually killed himself, "The Higher Blue" provides an epilogue to the collection."--BOOK JACKET.
A spine-tingling new collection of stories from the acclaimed author of Thrill Me and The Dark Net Benjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection, Thrill Me, he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed Refresh, Refresh, Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in Suicide Woods, a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods. A boy in his uncle’s care falls through the ice on a pond and emerges in a frozen, uncanny state. A group of people in therapy for suicidal ideation undergoes a drastic session in the woods with fatal consequences. A body found on a train and a blood-soaked carpet in an empty house are clues to a puzzling crime in a small town. And in a pulse-quickening novella, thrill seekers on a mapping expedition into the “Bermuda Triangle” of remote Alaska are stranded on a sinister island that seems to want them dead. In story after story, which have appeared in magazines ranging from the Virginia Quarterly Review and Orion Magazine to McSweeney’s and Ploughshares, Percy delivers haunting and chilling narratives that will have readers hanging on every word. A master class in suspense and horror, Suicide Woods is a dark, inventive collection packed to the gills with eerie, can’t-miss tales.
"A provocative new author. A fascinating debut novel. Read it!” —Jeff VanderMeer In Rachel Heng's debut set in near future New York City—where lives last three hundred years and the pursuit of immortality is all-consuming—Lea must choose between her estranged father and her chance to live forever. Lea Kirino is a “Lifer,” which means that a roll of the genetic dice has given her the potential to live forever—if she does everything right. And Lea is an overachiever. She’s a successful trader on the New York exchange—where instead of stocks, human organs are now bought and sold—she has a beautiful apartment, and a fiancé who rivals her in genetic perfection. And with the right balance of HealthTechTM, rigorous juicing, and low-impact exercise, she might never die. But Lea’s perfect life is turned upside down when she spots her estranged father on a crowded sidewalk. His return marks the beginning of her downfall as she is drawn into his mysterious world of the Suicide Club, a network of powerful individuals and rebels who reject society’s pursuit of immortality, and instead choose to live—and die—on their own terms. In this future world, death is not only taboo; it’s also highly illegal. Soon Lea is forced to choose between a sanitized immortal existence and a short, bittersweet time with a man she has never really known, but who is the only family she has left in the world.
LAPD Detective Harry Bosch as we've never seen him before, in three never-before-collected stories. In "Suicide Run," the apparent suicide of a beautiful young starlet turns out to be much more sinister than it seems. In "Cielo Azul," Bosch is haunted by a long-ago closed case -- the murder of a teenage girl who was never identified. As her killer sits on death row, Bosch tries one last time to get the answers he has sought for years. In "One Dollar Jackpot," Bosch works the murder of a professional poker player whose skills have made her more than one enemy. Whether investigating a cold case or fresh blood, Bosch relentlessly pursues his quarry, always on the lookout for the "tell." In this first collection of Harry Bosch stories, Michael Connelly once again demonstrates that he is the master of "fast-paced, brilliantly plotted crime fiction.... Harry Bosch is back on the case, and not a moment too soon" (Chicago Sun Times).
You see them every day, the suicide flowers. They bloom from the cracks and crevices of concrete sidewalks. From between asphalt creases and gaps. Yet these flowers blossom and prosper until the careless foot tramples. Others wither and fade, having survived, despite their strained and dubious foundations. Raeburn Messiah, the Messiah of Metal, sings for a living. Currently, he's on the downward spiral that unfaithful fame loves so dearly. He feels that he's got it bad, his life is over. That is, until he meets one of his most adoring fans, Gabriel, who has but months to live due to the complications of leukemia. They are men, both dying slow, painful deaths. But, each carries a secret that could save the other. For Raeburn and Gabriel are the suicide flowers, doomed to be trampled, destined to flourish.
The first book of its kind, . . . Or Not to Be offers rare insights into the lives--and deaths--of such luminaries as Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, Jim Jones, Anne Sexton, Hermann Goering, Kurt Cobain, and Yukio Mishima, via their last letters and suicide notes.
Life is about the choices that are made with the cards one has been dealt with. When the cards have all been dealt and played, the total sum of the choices defines a life that was lived. What distinguishes a happy life from an unhappy life? Reaction to events in life ultimately contribute to either happiness or unhappiness. There are a myriad of reactions one can exercise to react to an event that presents itself in life, and every life is therefore unique. Though the possible reactions are infinite, one act is always possible—suicide. Suicide is a choice that is always available; it is a constant possibility that is distinctly human and part of the construct of humanity itself. It is always available as an option, as a reaction, or a solution to an event. Rarely an event that arises without provocation, suicide is a decision to bring the contents of one’s life to a conclusion. The Suicide Diaries is a collection of stories that investigates a handful of people and their expression of humanity, examining the construction and culmination of the mind-set that has brought about the choice to react with suicide as the final act in the experience of life.
