The Suicide Kit

David L. Hayles's debut collection of short stories is an extraordinary, alarming excursion to a world populated by the suffering, the delusional and the criminally insane. It is a place where death comes unexpectedly and violently, at the hands of psychopaths, riflemen and cruel accident. These are tales of ingenious cruelty and sudden death in which menace and hilarity go hand in hand. But the twenty stories that make up The Suicide Kit, for all their freaks and grotesques, are imbued with a brilliant, 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 whilst 'The Cruise' opens to us the diary of a bored wife on a cruise liner who inadvertently murders her husband. Elsewhere, we meet a sadistic hotelier whose pleasure is the kidnapping of foreign arrivals at London's Victoria Coach Station, a homicidal corporal who wipes out his own platoon, the incredible Doctor Octor, the worst doctor on Harley Street, and Orson Beadle, travelling purveyor of sex toys, who finds within a fearsome pub a gaggle of willing male initiates. By turns surreal and provocative, The Suicide Kit is the fictional equivalent of a short ride in a fast machine.

ISBN 0436205688   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9780436205682 (What's this?)   Pages 176 Publisher Vintage   Weight (grammes) 210 Imprint Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd   Published in London Format Paperback   Height (mm) 216 Publication date 11 Jul 2002   Width (mm) 135 DEWEY 823.92   Academic level General

		the typing pool		1
		the suicide kit		15
		the dwarf-wrangler		17
		the cruise		35
		house of buggin'		43
		pigback apocalypse		53
		a cruel occurrence at victoria coach station		57
		the orgy		65
		the interview		73
		luther's sickle		79
		bones		85
		music		91
		from your son, jorge		97
		p.o.w		101
		the incredible doctor octor		113
		the singer		123
		the indian		133
		the swamp		141
		he sees us		151
		plastic ape tits		155
		orson beadle, travelling salesman		163
		the suicide kit		173

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