Showing titles in Dark Humor

Everyone’s heard of Nostradamus. No one’s heard of Philibert Montmorency. One was a legend. The other, not so much.... A newly discovered Nostradamus prophecy has taken the internet by storm thanks to "The Oblivion Doctrine", a group of online conspiracy theorists. Apparently the end is nigh. And in case anyone’s interested, nigh is definitely a Tuesday. Doctor Ally Oldfield, professor of Medieval Languages, is summoned to Lyon for a second opinion. She’s not happy about it. But then again she’s rarely happy about anything.

In the wake of their recent loss, the Caverns and Creatures gang are left hanging. Do their choices amount to more than waiting around to die of thirst and leaping to a quicker death? Probably, or else this would have been a much shorter story.

Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he’s inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobby’s prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the tower’s façade.

It's New Year's Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum's protagonist - an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer - fully unravels. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of - or into - the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief.

The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words); his wife, Beverley, a celebrated novelist; and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant.

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter Gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission.

Bubba’s back from Fairyland, and sometimes it feels like they shoulda just stayed there! Man, coming back to the real world sucks. Bubba and his whole team have been fired on account of going MIA for a year and a half (yeah, time moves differently in Fairyland - yay), and now they’ve got to…get jobs? Oh, this is going to go well.

From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.

New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother’s sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol.

After the events of the first two books of the Vicious Circle series, Carey and Randall reached LA during the early '80s punk scene, which was heavily mixed up with Chinatown. A young Chinese girl with silver hair is the Empty One that seems to run things there, and her ex-lover, an Empty One named Zang, has apparently turned against them and may or may not be on Carey's side.

The world looks different a year after the dead rose from their graves. Survivors live in walled enclaves while the zombies roam freely in the wasteland. John, Chris, and Erik have made their home in the enclave of Haven and earn their keep in town by scavenging for supplies outside the walls. These excursions bring them face-to-face with grubby urchins, deadly warlords, and hordes of the undead.

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.

Composed in the early 1350s, in the wake of the Black Death, The Decameron comprises 100 short stories from all over the world, reset by Boccaccio among the flourishing merchant classes of Renaissance Italy. Their universal themes—love, sex, religion, fate, morality—resonate with us to this day, and their witty, satirical, bawdy voice sounds utterly modern. Monty Python star and medieval historian Terry Jones presents ten BBC Radio dramatisations of tales from Giovanni Boccaccio's humane and comic masterpiece

Summer 1989: Gunther Fahnstiel, once a tough cop who wasn't averse to taking a little side money from a certain madam, has just escaped the dementia ward of his Wichita nursing home. He's not exactly sure where he wants to go, but wherever it is, it has to do with the bag full of cash belonging to the man he accidentally backed over with his RV in 1979. During his search, Gunther begins to relive the violent fallout of that madam's sex lottery 40 years ago. As Gunther's memories unravel, his past and present will collide in a devastating reckoning.

Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit.

Amber Patterson is tired of being a nobody: an invisible woman who melts into the background. She deserves more. She deserves a life of wealth, luxury and leisure. Daphne Parrish is the golden girl of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut. With her model looks, her picture-perfect mansion and her millionaire husband, Jackson, she has everything Amber wants.

Henri Koskinen firmly believes in the power of common sense and order. That is until he moves in with Laura Helanto and her daughter. As Henri realises he has inadvertently become part of a group of local dads, a competing adventure park is seeking to expand their operations, not always sticking to the law in the process. Is it possible to combine the increasingly dangerous world of the adventure-park business with the unpredictability of life in a blended family? At first glance, the two appear to have only one thing in common: neither deals particularly well with a mounting body count.

Due to a temporary peace agreement between the Brotherhood and Corsican, Maxwell and Boris leave with the French and embark on an adventure that proves to be deadly, life-changing, and brutally hilarious.

"Stranger's Thing" by Robert Bevan: Four friends get more than they bargained for when they break into a seemingly abandoned research lab. "The Shingling" by Steve Wetherell: Johnny Terry, a recovering meth addict, is excited to start his new life as the caretaker at the Underpass Motel. Unfortunately, the Underpass is haunted by the ghosts of dead porn stars. "The Haunting of Whore House" by Robert Bevan: Lucy and her brother, Junkie, find out that moving was only the beginning of their troubles when they encounter the ghost of a little boy in the woods. Plus three more!