Mr. Suicide by Nicole Cushing

 
I am considerably late to the party on this, it being touted and praised for well over a year by this point.  Upon completion, I was quite ashamed of that fact. It's a wonderfully and wildly weird book.  the blurb from Jack Ketchum says it all "Novels don't come much more transgressive than this one."

It is the story of a troubled young boy (at the opening anyway) who grows to a troubled man.  He has bad thoughts and does terrible things. While most children would plot out games and adventures, he wants to murder his mother.  We see the entire world through his warped view and it just gets, well, warpier... I will admit, I was basically expecting a modern riff on The Bad Seed and my God, was I wrong.

Once grown and trying not to follow the urges of his sort-of imaginary acquaintance, Mr. Suicide, he runs away.  But not before his equally fucked-up brother gives him a key to salvation, a bible of sorts. It's a magazine called Perfect Monsters and it sets this ride on an entirely different set of tracks as we careen and swerve into so much darkness and brutal crushing despair that you almost need to gulp for air.

The closest thing I can liken this novel to is the feeling I got when I read The Cipher by Kathe Koja, all those years ago.   My brain whizzing and screaming as it tries to put together what it's visualizing from the prose.  What started as just another troubled kid story morphs and evolves into a swaggering and sneering monstrosity of anger and seething rage, painted in blood and bile while still trying and some how succeeding in being human.

Brilliant.  And terrifying.
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Mr. Suicide is available from the fine folks at Word Horde.

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