The Suicide Club

The people in these eight interlaced stories are "bound together by the worst sort of grief," the kind that can devour you after someone close takes his or her own life. Wednesday evenings in Hope Springs, Oklahoma, offer the usual middle-American options: TV, rec league sports, eating out, and church. For Slater, Holly, and SueAnn, it is the night their suicide survivors group meets. They once felt little else in common, aside from a curiosity about Jane, the group facilitator, but now they understand how deeply they need each other.SueAnn mourns for her son, who hanged himself. Slater is left impotent by the loss of his father, who deliberately overdosed on pills and alcohol. Holly can't let go of her boyfriend, who shot himself. But if suicide has stolen their capacity to laugh, it has honed their sense of absurdity. Even in the darkest undertones of what her characters think and say, Toni Graham reveals a piercingly funny cast, short on patience with themselves and...