If words could kill: Suicide Thursday by Will Carver #excerpt #SuicideThursday #CarverCult #RandomThingsTours

Hi and welcome to FromBelgiumWithBookLove where it is my absolute pleasure to share with you an excerpt from Suicide Thursday! Check out my review here if you missed it the first time around, but the long and short of it is that it’s a sneaky book that snuck up on me and burrowed itself under my skin without me even noticing. It’s a thriller / drama / undefinable sort of book that tackles a heavy subject but is laced with this author’s trademark dark humour and I’d say it’s definitely one to add to your Orenda collection!

Many thanks to Anne Cater for having me on the tour, and to Orenda Books for the excerpt.

Let’s have a quick look at the blurb first:

Eli Hagin can’t finish anything.
He hates his job, but can’t seem to quit. He doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend, but doesn’t know how to end things with her, either. Eli wants to write a novel, but he’s never taken a story beyond the first chapter.
Eli also has trouble separating reality from fiction.
When his best friend kills himself, Eli is motivated, for the first time in his life, to finally end something himself, just as Mike did…
Except sessions with his therapist suggest that Eli’s most recent ‘first chapters’ are not as fictitious as he had intended … and a series of text messages that Mike received before his death point to something much, much darker…

Right! You ready for this? Let’s go find Mike…

He is sitting there. 

When they find Mike, he is just … sitting there. 

It doesn’t really look right. Is there actually a right way to kill yourself ? 

He is sitting there, on his floor, his wooden living-room floor. 

Recently, he decided to take a home-study French-polishing course, and this was his first conquest, his own lounge. He was so proud. And I am glad. Glad it has had a recent spruce because it makes the job of mopping up the blood much easier: it hasn’t soaked into the wood – although it did fall between some of the cracks. It shouldn’t really do that but it was only his first attempt. 

He is sitting there. Dead. But actually sitting up. 

Sitting, on his newly self-polished wooden floor, leaning against his used-to-be-pea-green two-seater sofa. It used to be that colour but, over time, and through lack of care and more attention paid to the wooden floor, it has turned brown. 

It isn’t a dirty brown, although it is dirty. It is the kind of brown you get when you try to make purple by mixing red and blue poster paint. Of course, this never works so you end up adding yellow ochre to brighten it, then a green to darken it again. Then you think, perhaps white will lighten it up so the brown is more detectable, but this turns it grey. So you add red and blue again, maybe cadmium yellow this time. 

That is the colour of Mike’s sofa. 

I don’t know how it got like that, probably some self-taught, home-study, dye-your-own-sofa-to-match-your-new-room course. Gone wrong. It was only his first attempt, though. 

So, he is sitting there. Sitting up. Sitting, on his newly polished floor, leaning against his badly dyed and eroding sofa. One of those sofas your aunt had in the eighties. With the gold tassling that frames and segments each rectangular section of this monstrous furnishing. 

Mike is sitting there with his hands in his legs. 

Not on. 

In. 

In his legs. 

Slitting the wrists can take far too long. I can remember him saying that he could never slit his wrists; of course, I took that to mean that he would never kill himself. Not that he would do this. Some people slit their wrists in the bath. I always thought that maybe it dulls the pain or something, but actually it still hurts. A lot. It just looks like you are in a bath full of blood. Perhaps people do it just for the imagery or drama. That would be too clichéd for Mike. 

Obviously. 

If you slit your legs, you enter a whole other league. 

It can no longer be misconstrued as a cry for help. 

You mean business. 

You want to die. And you want to die quickly. 

In your thigh, just above the sartorius muscle, where the skin on your leg creases before your hip, there is a pretty major artery with a sign on it saying: ‘Please do not cut here.’ Mike chose to ignore this sign. 

And breathe! Suicide Thursday is out in digital formats and paperback on 24 November! Pre-order directly from Orenda Books here.