General Information
===================
 Title:                  The Suicide Collectors
 Author:                 David Oppegaard
 Read By:                Robertson Dean
 Copyright:              2008
 Audiobook Copyright:    2008
 Genre:                  SF Thriller
 Publisher:              Books on Tape
 Abridged:               No

Original Media Information
==========================
 ISBN:                   978-1-4159-6238-1
 Media:                  CD
 Number:                 6
 Source:                 Library
 Condition:              Used

File Information
================
 Number of MP3s:         6
 Total Duration:         7:12:37
 Total MP3 Size:         198.06
 Parity Archive:         No
 Ripped With:            EAC/Goldwave
 Encoded With:           LAME
 Encoded At:             CBR 64 kbit/s 44100 Hz Mono
 Normalize:              None
 Noise Reduction:        None
 ID3 Tags:               Set, v1.1, v2.3

Book Description
================
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Eloquent prose and haunting characters lift Oppegaar's
astonishing debut, an SF thriller with some eerie similarities to M.
Night Shyamala's film about mass suicide, The Happening. In the near
future, 90% of the world's population have killed themselves due to
a plague called the Despair. The only people energized by the nightmare
are the Collectors, who after each suicide appear like carrion birds
to collect the corpse. Only one man resists the Collectors. When the
wife of a 34-year-old Floridian named Norman takes a fatal overdose
of sleeping pills, Norman loads his shotgun and waits patiently before
blowing the head off a Collector who arrives to claim the body. Norman
and his neighbor, Franklin Pops Conway, head for Seattle after learning
a doctor there may have found a cure for the Despair. In Kansas, theyre
joined by Zero, an 11-year-old girl whose bravery encourages Norman
in his quest. While the story may be too bleak for many readers, the
ending holds out some hope. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All rights reserved. 

Review
"* "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."

Debut novelist Oppegaard shows considerable promise but poor follow
through in a post-apocalyptic tale that owes much to paperback sci-fi
and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The novel opens in Florida, where pals
Norman and Pops make small talk before Norman returns home to find that
his wife Jordan has committed suicide by taking pills. Presently, a
cadre of dark-robed figures arrives: "Their faces were pale and smooth,
like polished skulls. Hardly human at all." They are Collectors, who
have carried away the dead ever since a plague called "the Despair"
ushered in the near-demise of humankind by mass suicide five years earlier.
After Norman guns one down before they can take his wife, he and Pops
flee in a small plane, pursuing the rumor of a cure in Seattle. Shot
down in Kansas City by other survivors, they make their way west, accompanied
by a haunted teenage girl named Zero. Oppegaard demonstrates a terrific
sense of the macabre with absorbing sequences featuring feral [CENSORED]ren,
a house papered in suicide notes and other relics of a dying society.
He also articulately ponders why such a plague might materialize. "Think
of all the people who have died on this planet during the past millions
of years," muses the mayor of Kansas City, a convict before the plague.
"Maybe all that negative energy has found a place to come together,
to unify in its desire for revenge on the living, breathing people who
still enjoy a world they no longer have any access to?" By the time
Norman reaches Seattle, Pops is dead, and the Collectors have kidnapped
Zero. What might have been sustained as a grim dystopian fantasy finishes
with a nonsensical finale as Norman arms himself with super-grenades
and heads out to "Death Island" to rescue Zero and face "the Source,"
the unexplained director of the plague and the Collectors.An inventive
but erratic meditation on waiting for the end of the world. (Kirkus
Reviews)