Book review: The Suicide Collectors by David Oppegaard

"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."


The author is an '02 grad of my college, so I showed up at a recent signing/reading on campus and scored an autographed copy.

I know that listing comparisons is lazy and inexact, but with so many parallels suggesting themselves so easily here it's a handy shorthand to convey the "feel" of Oppegaard's story--so bear with me.

As seen in the description, the setup is very much in the vein of Children of Men (though with the depopulation a few stages further along), as well as M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. The plot is basically a post-apocalyptic road picture, with our protagonist Norman encountering various groups of survivors and overcoming hazards natural and manmade. The mysterious Collectors, who spirit away the remains of the fallen, reminded me of the Strangers in Dark City, and the descriptions of a crumbling, recently abandoned America evoked The Postman--the movie not the book since I haven't read it, and I want to note that I reference it not sarcastically but as a compliment, since I really enjoy that movie despite the detractors.

As io9 pointed out, it "may be the first novel ever to have a blurb from Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and reviews comparing it to Cormac McCarthy's The Road." (Incidentally, the film adaptation of the latter is scheduled for October 16.)

Verdict: It was OK but not great. You can definitely tell it was a first novel. It had a solid plot and some great individual elements, but didn't quite live up to the promise of the setup, and the prose itself varies between really good and extremely uninspired. I suppose vocabulary and simple sentence structure is silly to get hung up on, but that's me. (I can't stand Hemingway for the same reason, which is probably why I never became an English major. I grant that there's probably a lot of great stuff of his that I'm missing out on; if that makes me a Philistine, so be it.)

I give The Suicide Collectors 3.5 out of 5. Then again, my expectations were high because reviews were very positive--for example, it's been named a finalist for the 2008 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel--so your mileage may vary. It's pretty short and is definitely worth a read if you enjoyed any of the plots/films I mentioned above, but I'd check it out of the library or wait for the paperback.

I will say that I am looking forward to seeing what else Oppegaard comes up with. His followup novel Wormwood, Nevada will be released in December 2009, also from St. Martin's Press.

I'd follow my dreams if I could figure out what they are...

Today's quasi-inspirational message is brought to you by xkcd. Click for full view.

Cras te victurum, cras dicis, Postume, semper;
dic mihi, cras istud, Postume, quando venit?
Quam longe cras istud? ubi est? aut unde petendum?
Numquid apud Parthos Armeniosque latet?
Iam cras istud habet Priami vel Nestoris annos.
Cras istud quanti, dic mihi, possit emi?
Cras vives? Hodie iam vivere, Postume, serum est:
ille sapit quisquis, Postume, vixit heri.
-- Martial, Epigrams 5.58

You always say, Postumus, that you will live tomorrow.
Tell me: when will it come, that "tomorrow" of yours?
How far off is it? Where is it? Or from where should it be sought?
Does it lie hidden among the Parthians or the Armenians?
Already your "tomorrow" has as many years as Priam or Nestor.
Tell me: for what price can your "tomorrow" be bought?
You say you'll live tomorrow? It's already too late to live today, Postumus.
He is a wise man, Postumus, who lived yesterday.

Creative writing is not Mad Libs

I was reading through some archived posts on Orson Scott Card's website (Hugo and Nebula award-winning author) and came across this one on Themes and an even older one on Plagiarism, Borrowing, Resemblance, and Influence.

From the first one:

If the writer has a preconceived conscious plan for how to present a particular philosophical point, he will start to ignore his own unconscious ideas and will force the characters to act out his little allegory.* The result is: Bad fiction, and therefore an ineffective presentation of the theme. But if the writer shunts aside those preconceived plans, or subverts them deliberately (i.e., make THOSE ideas belong to a character that the audience is supposed to despise), that very humility leads the writer free to tap into his unconscious feelings and ideas about how the world works and what is worth telling tales about.

The reader who gets the story that truthfully and powerfully connects with the real world by way of the writer's unconscious understanding of it WILL find "themes" in the story. But they won't necessarily be themes that the writer was aware of, and will almost never be themes that the writer "put" into the tale.

*(Tolkien also disliked allegory, for the same reason--its artificiality.)

It's definitely worth clicking on through to the full columns. OSC also has some words about "literary writers who try to write about themes":

In a way, this is identical to "hack" work - trying to insert elements that will please a particular kind of audience. Most of the time, when these stories work at all, they do so, not because of the "plan" of the work but in spite of it, because of unconscious concerns that bubble up into the story and give it life despite the deadly story-killing "theme" elements that the writer consciously manipulates.

He explicitly says that the writer can't force themes into his work but has to trust that his unconscious will make the connections as he composes.

This is very similar to what he says about influences, in the other column. The first two-thirds is pretty standard stuff about plagiarism, working with sources, and so on. But when he gets to "derivative" creation and "the anxiety of influence," it really gets interesting:

The problem is that real influence is (or should be) unconscious. That is, because you have read certain writers whose stories have been thoroughly absorbed into your memory, you will unconsciously borrow motifs and ideas from those pivotal works without even realizing you're doing it.

[...]

Some novice writers, having absorbed utterly wrong lessons about what makes good writing, try to be "influenced" by writers they admire. This is not influence, however - it is borrowing. And it's legitimate, though it is customary to acknowledge your conscious borrowings.

If you want to follow in someone's creative footsteps, you can't just deconstruct their work to a list of representative attributes and try to string them together, or you won't get a coherent product. You'll get either something mechanically derivative or a Frankenstein mess.

OSC also notes:

Many writers, however, far from borrowing or seeking to be "influenced," are desperately afraid of inadvertent influence to the point of paranoia. Since every good idea has already been used, getting too anxious about such chance resemblances is a waste of time. Here's my rule: Any idea you really like that absolutely works for your story is your idea, no matter who else might have used it before.

Similarly, in the acknowledgements to Star Wars: Allegiance, Timothy Zahn noted:

Often a writer's mind functions like a giant food processor, taking in thoughts and ideas from everywhere and then mixing and matching the pieces until something new (or at least unrecognizable) emerges. On the rare occasions when we're actually able to trace something directly to its source, it's only right we acknowledge it.

Creative writing is not plug-and-play, it's not Mad Libs, but it is on the subconscious level an exercise in mix-and-match. Not to downplay the obvious importance of conscious composition, but on a subconscious level the creative person's brain combines fragments you've read or seen into a new configuration, and half the time you don't recognize the original ingredients until much later.

Finally, 18th-century author Samuel Johnson said the following:

When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Looking back at my own ratio of books written (zero) to libraries overturned, I can say he was definitely on the right track.