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Why These Tragedies Happen
The Suicide Council is a work of speculative fiction that draws on Émile Durkheim’s four categories of suicide and imagines a heavenly council assigned to review the lives of people who die by suicide. Where did the idea for this book come from?
I was a big fan of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. When I heard news of his death, I was deeply saddened, as a mediocre guitar player watching him on MTV’s unplugged play Bowie’s Man who sold the World”, I couldn’t believe someone that creative would want to end his life, from the outside he was the envy for every musician, ANd even though he did leave a note, he did not explain what happened that led him to this. The note was mostly asking for forgiveness. I just felt there has to be a way to find out why people end their life besides the all-knowing God. I wanted to tell a story about a way to find out what happened, even if it took a lifetime. I am no longer a true believer in faith anymore. But I wanted to believe God would consider why people end their lives and not automatically go to hell. The Suicide Council was the only way a suicide victim could plead their case to be redeemed for the victim.
The novel explores suicide through very different life stories rather than a single narrative. Why did you choose an interconnected case-by-case structure for the book?
I am sad to say these were the most common reasons that people currently understand why these tragedies happen. I wanted also to show there was a way to find out why this happened. If it gave anyone hope, I succeeded in getting my point across. Do I still want to know why Kurt Cobain killed himself? Yes, but I also want to believe you might not find out till after death.
Despite dealing with difficult subject matter, the book avoids sensationalism and instead emphasizes compassion and understanding. Was striking that balance one of your biggest challenges as a writer?
It was very difficult trying to not blame mental illness. I didn’t want to give Psychiatry a debate to prove what I got wrong or challenge my view of death. The other challenge was being as sensitive as possible to tell a story that happened to a friend of mine, who told me a story in confidence.
After readers finish The Suicide Council, what conversations do you hope they’ll have about mental health, compassion, and faith?
I don’t want people to forget their loved one but to move on with their life. I want people to spend their life looking for blame or what they missed or could have done more to help this person. There is an answer, and hopefully one day they will find out the reason.
The Suicide Council: Before God Decides
The Suicide Council: Before God Decides, by Victer Hugo Basurco, is a work of speculative theological fiction that imagines a heavenly council assigned to review the lives of people who die by suicide before God makes a final judgment. The book moves through a series of cases, each centered on a different person and a different kind of pain, while drawing on Émile Durkheim’s four categories of suicide. It is part spiritual drama, part social reflection, and part literary fiction, with each chapter asking the same difficult question from a new angle: what does a life look like when we see the whole story instead of only the final act?
Basurco isn’t interested in shock value, even though the subject matter is heavy. He keeps returning to the people behind the headlines, the rooms before the silence, the memories that pile up until someone can no longer carry them. Some chapters feel almost like case files, but the better moments are more intimate than that. A daughter reviewing her father’s life. A stranger discovering the weight of one small act of kindness. A family left to sort through grief that has no clean edges. Those scenes give the book its strongest emotional pull.
I also found myself thinking a lot about the author’s choice to frame these stories through a divine bureaucracy. That could have felt cold, but here it creates distance just long enough for the reader to keep looking. Miriam, Macarius, Muhyi, Cyprian, and Belial give the novel a structure that keeps it from becoming only a collection of tragedies. Belial’s presence adds tension, sometimes bluntly, while the heavenly representatives bring compassion and inquiry. Not every section lands with the same force, and at times I think the dialogue explains more than it needs to. Still, the book’s sincerity is hard to dismiss. It wants to understand rather than condemn.
I would recommend The Suicide Council to readers who appreciate reflective speculative fiction, faith-based literary fiction, and stories that wrestle openly with grief, judgment, mercy, and the unseen reasons people break. For readers willing to sit with painful material handled with compassion, this novel offers a thoughtful and searching experience. It feels less like a book trying to answer every question and more like one asking us to look longer before deciding what we think we know.
Pages: 125
