Official Review: Suicide in Tiny Increments

[Ravenmount]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Suicide in Tiny Increments" by Riya Anne Polcastro.]

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Daniel, a man bored by the tedium of his stalled life chooses an extreme form of suicide, one that backfires horribly. In the aftermath of his choice, he finds more adventure than he could ever have dreamed of. In Suicide in Tiny Increments, Riya Anne Polcastro somehow manages to combine drugs, depression, suicide, hoarding, obsessive-compulsive disorder, narcolepsy and borderline personality disorder into one single story, along with plenty of raunchy sex and a cast of seemingly unlikeable characters, resulting in a thoroughly entertaining novel.

Daniel Long works in a cubicle, in a boring life made worse by the fact that the woman he loves left him, quite some time ago, and he still wants her back. He contemplates suicide, a lot, but as a coward he just can't get past thinking about it to actually trying to kill himself, so he hires a hit-man to kill him instead. It should be an easy hit, but then everything starts going wrong, and Daniel finds he is in the midst of a story worthy of an action movie, and no longer bored at all.

The plot would be cheesy and the characters annoying and unbelievable, but Polcastro does an excellent job of character development and pacing so that even though it is hard to really like Daniel, or most of the characters, they seem real enough and consistent enough that it is easy to get drawn into the story. My favorite character in this book was actually the bad guy, Death, who turns out to be an almost lovable, complex character, perhaps the most likeable of the lot.

I really enjoyed this book, but I must say that the use of present tense for much of the story felt very awkward. The story was great, but every so often I would start to lose interest, and I found that it was generally because I was translating the story as I read it into past tense, which sounded more natural. When I realized that the pages I was reading were still in present tense, I'd get thrown off and have to get back into the story again. As it is, Polcastro's written a very entertaining book, but it lacks the polish that would make it truly memorable, mostly in details like present versus past tense. And, especially where sex is involved, it seemed as if the storytelling became disjointed, as if the writer was not quite as comfortable writing those scenes and let her unease come out in her writing somehow. This made the sexual portions of the book seem more pornographic than they really were, which for some readers might be okay, but it also hindered the flow of the overall book, for which pornography seems to be intended as just a detail, not the point of the story.

If we were on a decimal rating system I would give this book a 3.6 out of 4, but otherwise I gave this book a 3 out of 4 stars. If I were a reader looking to read porn, I probably would have leaned more towards a 4, but if I found the disjointed, raunchy sex scenes to be inelegantly woven into the fabric of this book, many readers would not have finished the book at those scenes, or would have at least been very uncomfortable. Nonetheless, Suicide in Tiny Increments is a fun, fast-paced adventure that many readers will relate to and enjoy thoroughly.

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