The Suicide Kit

A surreal and provocative debut collection of short stories. The twenty stories ofThe Suicide Kit, for all their freaks and grotesques, are imbued with a warped and brutal humour. “The Typing Pool” features the tyrannical director of a detention camp, a man in search of a secretary, whose competitive dictation test ends, as planned, in the execution of all but one of the applicants. In “Bones”, an uxorious man, fearful of his habit of falling out of love, takes a tribal potion designed to bring blissful fidelity only to begin a strange descent into necrophilia; while “The Cruise” opens the diary of a bored wife on an ocean liner who inadvertently murders her husband. Elsewhere, we meet a sadistic hotelier whose pleasure is the kidnapping of foreign arrivals at London’s Victoria Station, a homicidal corporal who wipes out his own platoon, the incredible Doctor Octor, the worst doctor on Harley Street and Orson Beadle, a travelling purveyor of sex toys.