Spoilers ahoy, because this book has to be revealed to be believed. Freida McFadden’s Suicide Med is an absolutely bonkers thriller that I’m almost at a loss to describe. The story revolves around a small group of medical students who attend a school known for its string of suicides. The book is divided into parts, each part from the point of view of a different student. There is the dippy one, the temptress, the ferocious competitor, the handsome sociopath and the lumbering ox. Plus an anatomy professor who is having an affair with the temptress.
The plot is all over the place. The book opens with the sociopath aiming a gun at a fellow student in the anatomy lab. From there we learn about each medical student, one with a bland story about how much they love their long distance boyfriend who dumps them, one with a confusing story about hearing voices telling them to kill, and one with an eye growing out of their ass. Where even to begin?
I’ll keep this short, because this book was b-a-n-a-n-a-s. At first it seemed it might be a thriller about the school’s suicides (and one murder-suicide), with perhaps a killer orchestrating everything, but no. The suicides are barely mentioned throughout the book, except as some sort of vague curse tied to a professor. So maybe this is a supernatural thriller? It could have been, but instead we spend time with wound-up medical students falling in love and lust for a good portion of the book. So it’s a slice of life story about young people living and learning under the pressures of becoming doctors? Well, sort of, but then the ferocious competitor starts poisoning the sociopath with hallucinogens to get ahead, culminating in the sociopath killing the randy professor by shooting him in the face. The sociopath goes to jail, and the poisoner goes on to be a successful doctor who everyone hates, so her coworker starts poisoning her coffee, the end.
But the best storyline is about how the ox loves dippy, but he can’t make love to her because he has a hideous secret, which turns out to be an actual eye on his ass. He goes to have it looked at by some doctors, who refuse to remove it because tests reveal there is still some brain matter attached to the eye which responds to stimulus, including TEARING UP at a sad picture. They explain that he has a parasitic twin and they refuse to “kill” it. Despondent, the ox turns to a quack to remove the growth.
The doctor butchers him with filthy instruments, but manages to remove the eye. Only the ox soon finds himself going into fits of rage which lead him to beating people up and mutilating a lab cadaver to get his angry ya ya’s out. He finally gets down with his lady love, but afterwards struggles not to stab her to death with a pair of scissors. He decides to sublimate his homicidal urges into being a surgeon, understanding that his twin had been the “good” one who had kept him from slicing everyone up just for fun. He marries dippy and becomes the best surgeon on the ward, who never turns down a chance to carve someone up.
Thus ends my wild ride with Freida McFadden, though I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this wackadoodle plot. But I’ve run out of her books to read (some I read but didn’t review here) and nothing can top this one anyway. Time to get back on track with Bingo and leave this in the rearview.
