The End of Everything (ePub)

It is midnight at the Winterbourne Psychiatric Institution. The only sound is the staccato hammering of a Smith-Corona Silent-Super typewriter. The crack of its Bakelite keys ricochet through the corridors like six-inch nails pounded into a solid mahogany plank. Known only as Fritz, the man at the typewriter rails against the world while plotting his own suicide. So begins a dark, comedic romp through the complex mind of a man on the edge.

Fritz takes great pleasure in his above-average IQ and revels in exposing the psychological aberrations of others. The memento mori he is writing is both a justification for his rational suicide, and a treatise on everything that's wrong with the world. He rants about psychiatry, philosophy, politics, religion, and the death of art, culture, and literature.

Characters include the incompetent ex-proctologist, Dr. Volker Bismarck, a gin-soaked Anglican priest, Father Fyodor, Sad Sally, a depressive case, the no-nonsense Nurse Popova, a Polish ex-wrestler named Jacob Kosinski, the delusional fantasist Gorilla Billy, a black raven, and others.

The reader is taken on a journey and is left to figure out whether Fritz is mentally unstable, or perhaps a genius? Is he a hypochondriac or a malingerer? Will he successfully carry out his final solution, or back out at the last moment?