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    The Suicide Collectors
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    The Suicide Collectors
    Unavailable
    The Suicide Collectors
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Suicide Collectors

    Written by David Oppegaard

    Narrated by Robertson Dean

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In one of the most stunning debuts to come along in years, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's best work and P. D. James's classic The Children of Men, David Oppegaard gives us a world whose near future presents some terrifying realities.

    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.

    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 that a scientist in Seattle is working on a cure for the Despair, but in a world ruled by death, it won't be easy for Norman to get there.

    "The Suicide Collectors takes us to a startling theme we haven't encountered before, with every page a thrilling new surprise." --Stan Lee, co-creator of Spiderman


    From the Compact Disc edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateDec 9, 2008
    ISBN9781415962398
    Unavailable
    The Suicide Collectors
    Author

    David Oppegaard

    David Oppegaard was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from St. Olaf College and an M.F.A. in Writing from Hamline University.  A 2005 Iowa Fiction Award finalist, David has worked as an optician, 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 is the author of the novel The Suicide Collectors.

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    Reviews for The Suicide Collectors

    3/5

    58 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      The book was about a virus called the Despair which caused otherwise happy people to commit suicide. At the start of the book, much of the U.S. population was gone. The idea was certainly intriguing, but there were too few characters in the story, and you spent the entire read waiting for them to off themselves. Very depressing. To me this book was more for the horror genre.
    • 3/5
      This book was unique--it had bits of my favorite genres (dystopia, mystery, apocolyptic type stuff) and some new stuff--some kind of virus that makes everyone feel depressed and lonely (and there are mass suicides)...I like the twist.

      The ONLY thing I would like to have more information on is...well...the end. It didn't explain how or why it all happened, or really tell the reader what happened with the characters. That kind of ambiguity I can take to an extent (Margaret Atwood does that all the time)...but I *almost* felt like the author was just trying to get out of coming up with an explanation... oh well?

      Quick easy holiday read.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to really like this book just because the premise was so fascinating. But I think this dude had a deadline he was about to miss because he ended it very abruptly, without explaining anything, and it just didn't gel with the rest of the book. It was a little like drinking a decent cup of coffee. It's doing its job, it tastes pretty good, but you put it down for a minute and when you pick it back up it is cold and more bitter than you thought previously. So you stop drinking it and get another cup. I'm ready for my next book.
    • 5/5
      For the first time in my entire life I can honestly say I could not put down a book. I wish the ending had a better finish but the overall story was simply awesome!
    • 3/5
      This was another book read for genre-expanding.The basics of the plot: There's this great sadness, almost like a disease, spreading over the world and causing people to commit suicide. A lot of people. Like 90% of the world. Of course, there are some survivors, and they make a pilgrimage of sorts.The story clips along, and it's like reading a good zombie book or post-apocalypse story. What's nice and different is that the author doesn't make every person into a complete asshole, which is unusual for the genre. It's more realistic in that sense. It kind of sucks that one of the best books of all time, the Road, fits into this genre and all others will be compared to it. Because let's face it, that book is fantastic and pretty tough to match up with.There were three essential things about the Suicide Collectors that bothered me:1. There's a female character who is 11, but she seems awfully mature for 11. I guess that might happen if you saw people killing themselves all damn day, but why not just make her 14?2. The ending is a little unsatisfying. However, there is an ending, so props for that.3. This is kind of a personal pet peeve, but there are two fairly long dream sequences, or what you might call dream sequences. I just have no patience for that in fiction. It's a made up story, so what is the point of a mde-up story inside of a made-up story? Also, in literature, dreams almost always have some deeper significance, but it's sort of a cheat because that significance should come in the story, not within a dream within the story. It feels like taking a shortcut that I can't really abide by. Again, personal pet peeve, so if that stuff doesn't bother you, you'll be fine.
    • 1/5
      This book reads like a really bad 'B' movie, I'm thinking Soylent Green or Omega Man. I don't know who is more responsible, the author for providing a deeply unsatisfying story, or the publisher for unnecessarily giving hope to an author who appears to be fairly untalented.
    • 4/5
      Good book. A post-apocalyptic story with an interesting twist. Worth reading.
    • 4/5
      The story starts five years into the mysterious Despair and 90% of the world's population has committed suicide. Norman takes a stand against the enigmatic Collectors who are the undertakers in this brave new world. They appear and collect the bodies in helicopters and carry them away. After his defiance Norman decides to leave his small town in Florida and travel to Seattle where it is rumored that a cure for the Despair is being worked on. He convinces his friend and neighbor Pops to go with him and pick up a stray young girl named Zero along the way. Things build to a fairly unpredictable if slightly disappointing confrontation with the power that controls the Collectors called the Source. I really wanted to like this book and I did enjoy reading it. I loved the name of Zero for a character and the reason behind it resonated with me. There were several clever items in the book that I wondered (hoped) were on purpose. The location of Seattle for the place of the cure was pretty inspired. The author even made a veiled reference to coming to see the wizard. All they had to do was follow the Duracrete road. Also having Seattle be the place where people have avoided suicide is sort of ironic given the urban myth surrounding suicide rates in a city where it is perpetually raining. The snippets of the country that Norman encounters were well formed and I would have loved to see the journey take longer. In general I wanted more from the book. (I read a lot of verbose authors and it took me a while to get used to Oppegarad's brisk style. The style reminded me a little bit of Johnathan Lethem's shorter works.) From the very beginning I wanted to know more about Norman and what his life was like before the Despair. I found it a little hard to relate to him and while I enjoyed the construct of all the characters I didn't really care about any of them. Definitely worth reading and I will pick up the next book by Oppegaard when it comes out.
    • 4/5
      An interesting and, occasionally, fascinating storyline, too often bogged down by mediocre writing and a very unsatisfactory ending. This book is worth reading if the premise of mass suicide, collectors of suicide victims (in the literal sense), and the survivors (aka as movers), interest you. It did me, and, while I don't regret reading his book, it could been a much better one had the author (1st published book) been more careful with his writing and put more thought into the book's ending. By the way, in my reviews I will not be spending most of my time explaining the plot. You can read the book for that.