LEGEND OF A SUICIDE: STORIES rates a quiet and respectful wow. All about suicide and the far-reaching ripples such an act sends out. Author David Vann was just thirteen when he lost his father to suicide. Writing fiction has been how he has dealt with it. And the stories here are, no question, thinly veiled autobiography. Compelling and gripping, yes - they must be, because I started reading the book after dinner one night, and suddenly I looked up and it was nearly midnight and I had read over 150 pages. The centerpiece story, however - "Sukkwan Island" - is obviously an impressive, horrifying and very moving work of imagination. It is also the longest story here. There is also lots of local color detail, of Alaska, especially Ketchikan and the archipelago islands of southeastern Alaska. Vann was born on Adak, a desolate rock in the Aleutians, a onetime military base, where his father was stationed as an Army dentist.

What becomes all too clear in most of these stories is the father's mental instability, that he was undoubtedly bipolar, with erratic mood swings and an unhealthy preoccupation with (and a large colection of) guns - a deadly mix.

I was caught up by Vann's stories. He is a masterful tale-spinner who knows far too much about the awful effects of divorce, mental illness and suicide. Readers are hereby forewarned of his subject. That said, my very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

A collection of short stories and one novella inspired the author's attempts to come to terms with his father's suicide when he (the author) was in his teens.

The author is very good at describing the natural and human scenery in which the stories are set. I enjoyed the novella the most because it did actually tell a story, while the short stories were more like snapshots with something added to provoke classroom discussion. ( )

David Vann makes no secret of the fact that his father’s suicide provides the seed for this book. However, the stories in the collection are in no sense a literal rendering of the events that led his father to take his own life. Rather, one can understand them as a form of therapy or a means to confront and take control of a traumatic and life-shaping experience. What seems to be going on here is that Vann is addressing and interpreting his father’s suicide in a series of fictional treatments. Some appear to deal more or less squarely with the man’s life and character. Others take a sidelong perspective, approaching the issue via an exploration of father-son relationships. Vann’s fictional stand-in is Roy Fenn, who we encounter as both a boy and a man. Roy’s father, like the author’s father, was a dentist who hated his profession, a man who loved the outdoors and who because he grew to know himself too late, made a series of blunders and fatal miscalculations in his personal life that led to estrangement from his family and financial ruin. The stories depict the fallout from Roy’s father’s poor decisions: an affair with a woman named Rhoda, the receptionist at his dental practice, the purchase of a boat and an ill-fated attempt to make a living as a fisherman. Most striking and memorable is the long two-part story “Sukkwan Island.” The story takes place after the breakup of the family. Roy is thirteen and his father takes him homesteading on remote Sukkwan Island, in south-eastern Alaska. Roy’s father’s second marriage to Rhoda has also failed, because of his compulsive womanizing, though he has not given up on the relationship. The plan is that Roy and his father will deal with the hardships of winter alone together in a tiny cabin in almost complete isolation from civilization and human contact. However, over the long months of their confinement the father’s haphazard preparation, obsessive nature and myriad character flaws surface again and again, finally overwhelming the situation in which the two find themselves, with tragic results. Throughout the book the writing is suspenseful, tersely observant, sometimes poetic, always engaging. Legend of a Suicide is a book of great originality and power that depicts human weakness and its consequences unflinchingly. In the end however it is about survival, forgiveness and acceptance. ( )

What can one say? The guy is simply unique. The voice, the story, the suspense, the sheer awkwardness at times. The father and son locked on an island in Alaska is a really up-close story that gets under the skin, certainly with the knowledge one has gleaned already from the three preceding short stories. The father cries at night, virtually every night, and sometimes tells his son about his sins (him fucking around with hookers or his assistant in the dentist practice). He falls at some stage and it is not clear if he deliberately stepped off the cliff. He can be quite manipulative to his 13 year old son, like when he senses his son would like to leave the island ahead of winter trouble, isolation and possible madness, and then he says to Roy, he can go – the island and the winter experience is something for men after all, real men, not 13 year old boys. And then Roy walks into his father holding a hand gun to his head in the cabin. Dad freezes, turns and gives the gun to his son, walking out into the snow. He hears the shot, but initially thinks nothing of it. When he returns after some hours he finds the dead body of his son on the floor. And that’s the start of a wild trip of his father and the corpse, on a boat, landing on a long island, running out of fuel, breaking into an outhouse, lamenting his life, walking around the island, finally being discovered by a Police helicopter (after setting a section of the forest on fire, burning part of the outhouse). Being on trial for the murder of his son, escaping at some stage on a boat with two dubious types, who decide after receiving some money to kill the father, sensing they can do so with impunity since he’s on the run from justice, a relatively quick death in the icy water follows. Well, some revenge in writing! I think it is the best revenge I ever heard of! Harrowing, yet so utterly rewarding for Roy. After this gut-wrenching story there follow two more short stories, where David tries to understand his father by settling in a place where his father worked and ran off with a woman. He traces the woman and invites her for dinner together with her husband. The guy does some weird things, like killing young salmon babies at night that he is supposed to rear during his day-time job. Most beautifully and again gut-wrenching is how he likes the woman and can imagine with hindsight how his father fell for her, despite the fact that that was the start of the unravelling of his father’s family life and ultimately led him to his suicide. ( )

Sorry I read this book. Language was disconnected and it was hard to follow the story. ( )