The dice man

I started a new book today, The Dice Man, from Luke Rhineheart.

After having lived in moderate happiness with moderate success with an average wife and family for seven years, I found suddenly, around my thirty-second birthday, that I wanted to kill myself. And to kill several other people too. […] Now the desire to kill oneself and to assassinate, poison, obliterate or rape others is generally considered by the psychiatric profession as 'unhealthy'. Bad. Evil. More accurately, sin. When you have the desire to kill yourself, you are supposed to see it and 'accept it', but not, for Christ's sake, to kill yourself. If you desire to have carnal knowledge of a helpless teenybopper, you are to accept your lust, and not lay a finger on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine – but don't slug the bastard with a baseball bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself. It is a conservative doctrine, guaranteed to help the patient avoid violent, passionate and unusual acts and to permit a prolonged, respectable life of moderate misery.

It shows promise :)