Books like The Suicide Club

This was surprisingly lame, coming from no less a literary giant than Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote these stories as if they were intended for a second-rate boy's adventure magazine. The concept of a club for people who want to committ suicide is solid and reminiscient of something Hitchcock might have come up with, but Stevenson unfortunately does very little with it. The idea itself is ripe with potential moral conundrums and dramatic possibility, but Setevenson glazes over all of that, delivering instead a typical good guy vs. bad guy story every bit as one-dimensional as a battle between Dudley Do-right and Snidely Whiplash. The book is composed of three short stories, the second and third of which really have no good reason to exist. The characters are stiff and self-congratulatory, and even the good guys all go out of their way to find trouble, never even knowing what they're getting themselves into. The hero of the story is a prince who makes all kinds of bad decisions and is saved by his sidekick, though he remains the hero throughout due to his gentlemanly demeanor. I didn't know Stevenson was even capable of such shallow, unrealistic storytelling.