Showing titles in Dark Humour

The follow-up to Matt Shaw's Bite-Size: A Collection of Short Stories. Hear five more previously unpublished short stories from one of Britain's most warped imaginations.

In the second volume of The Black Knight Chronicles, vampire detectives Jimmy Black and Greg Knightwood investigate a series of assaults plaguing the alleys of Charlotte. Along the way they battle trolls, bigotry, fairies, dragons, and small minds on the way to a knock-down battle royal inside a steel cage. The boys find themselves fighting evil in alleys, trolls in bars, and dragons in FairyLand and trying to scrub the sparkle off after a battle with vicious fae in the hall of the fairy queen. Yeah, really. All that and vampires, too.

Una de las más brillantes e irreverentes farsas del autor, una sátira orgiástica donde el horror arranca carcajadas y en la que nadie se salva del ridículo, ya sea de izquierdas o de derechas, ecologista o partidario de la energía atómica, esposo fiel o donjuán irredento: ¡temblad, temblad, malditos! En esta novela, Wilt vive con su mujer, la inefable Eva, entregada a sus sucesivas pasiones alternativas, medicinales, nutritivas, religiosas, etc., y con sus temibles cuatrillizas...

Meet Cherry, a bandit queen on the run, driving a pink soft-top convertible through the Badlands of Southeast England. She's never felt more Thelma and Louise in her life - except there are three of them in the car and one of them is dead. How did a head nurse and mother of two end up driving a handcuffed policeman and the corpse of a murdered refugee on a journey to find justice? Pursued by a racist, roid-raged, shaven-headed officer of the law - not to mention by her husband and daughter - what else can a woman with a conscience do in modern Britain?

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse. Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors charts the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.

1972. Ten years on from the events of The Miseducation of Evie Epworth and Evie is settled in London working for the BBC. She has everything she's ever dreamed of (a career, a leatherette briefcase, an Ossie Clark poncho) but, following an unfortunate incident involving Princess Anne and a Hornsea Pottery mug, she finds herself having to rethink her life and piece together work, love, grief and multiple pairs of cork-soled platform sandals.

Darren Carver is vain, selfish, ambitious, corrupt, hedonistic, insincere, and a disgusting lowlife human. He is also your HR director. And your boss. He does not just hate you - he hates everyone. He does not embrace the corporate values. He would rather eat his own vomit than do that; in fact, he would rather eat your vomit. And the female HR director Catrina Carver is the same, if not worse.

When Rita McCall discovers her husband’s affair, there isn’t a lick of surprise—not a single tear or broken heart. Just a wife and mother who’s over it and ready to watch her twenty-three-year marriage go up in flames. Sticking close, thick as thieves since childhood, Rita’s unfailingly loyal cousins Jemel and Sharae become her lifeline. They stand beside her as she contemplates a new career and navigates the murky waters of being a preacher’s daughter disgraced by scandal.

If you are looking for epic space battles, if you are looking for generals achieving victory through genius tactics, if you are looking for berserker warriors carrying empires aloft on their swords, look elsewhere my friends. Here, you will find laughter. Here, a quartermaster must discover why the human insists that the mass produced broom, identical down to the molecule to every other broom on the base, is the "wrong" broom, and why and how they expect him to fix it.

A darkly comic tale about how winning the lottery can ruin your life. And it’s only downhill from there.... A support group for lottery winners? It shouldn’t exist. It was just a PR exercise. An afterthought. Nobody was actually supposed to turn up. Why, after all, would millionaires need support? But turn up they do, every Wednesday in a tired church hall in North London, among them an ex-builder, a model train fanatic, a well-spoken conman and now, downtrodden lawyer, Mark Jones.

Don is a clerk in the Quick Stop convenience store with a problem: He suddenly can’t remember his past or what he’s doing here. He thinks maybe he’s an angel sent on a mission. With Sancha, his only friend and fellow clerk, Don and Sancha of the Q set out on a quest to do some good and find out why he’s here. Maybe it has something to do with the stolen atomic bomb in Don Q’s basement. Maybe.

Angela Richman, Chouteau County death investigator, finds herself deep in the Missouri woods on a perfect spring day. But there is nothing idyllic about her grim walk - a body has been discovered in a muddy creek, and Detective Jace Budewitz wants Angela on the scene.

When Robert (or Kidder, as his best friend calls him) decides to impress at a job interview by making up a son, he discovers that maintaining the lie is far harder than he thought - so he invents a story that 'Brodie' has been kidnapped. After all, it's not like they're going to find the fake boy. But a few weeks later, Kidder receives a call to collect his nonexistent son from the police station, a boy who looks exactly like the picture he photoshopped....

For a formerly mindless thrall, Badass Mike’s life isn’t easy. Ever since he got into a tussle with the American justice system, his body has been forced to wander the Earth while his head is trapped in a jar. He could, of course, rely on his new acquaintance Billy Bitchcakes to help him out - that is if the little guy isn’t too busy working on his “brand”. Oh, and there’s also his lawyer, whose name is...

Nobody is more surprised than Billy when he finds himself bleeding out onto his new linoleum floor, a kitchen knife in his chest. Rose, his wife, and Born2Rock, her lover, are leaving for a night on the town. They're sure he'll be dead in no time. So is he. With the help of Consuela, the house keeper, Billy makes it to the hospital. After a short stint in the ICU, he returns to the scene of the crime, home, where he takes up residence in the attic. From this vantage point, Billy watches and waits and plots his revenge.

What do you do when your psychotic grandmother also happens to be Mab, the mad queen of the Winter Court of the Faerie, who has you and your friends imprisoned after you invade her realm searching for the long-lost sister you never knew you had? Well, if you're Bubba the Monster Hunter, you break out of prison, have a dance-off in the middle of a ball, and enter a mortal combat tournament against magical beasties. If you're not Bubba, then I don't know what you'd do!

Fred Van Lente's brilliant debut is both an homage to the Golden Age of Mystery and a thoroughly contemporary show-business satire. As the story opens, nine comedians of various acclaim are summoned to the island retreat of legendary Hollywood funnyman Dustin Walker. The group includes a former late-night TV host, a washed-up improv instructor, a ridiculously wealthy "blue collar" comic, and a past-her-prime Vegas icon.

Ray Welter, who was until recently a high-flying advertising executive in Chicago, has left the world of newspeak behind. He decamps to the isolated Scottish Isle of Jura in order to spend a few months in the cottage where George Orwell wrote most of his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray is miserable and quite prepared to make his troubles go away with the help of copious quantities of excellent scotch.

Vampires have walked among us for thousands of years. These reanimated corpses survive by draining and consuming the blood of the living, and their threat to humanity cannot be ignored. Throughout the centuries, professors and peasants have offered their own vampire-fighting tips, but these were often old wives' tales, based more on superstition than on fact. Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive vampire-fighting guide for the 21st century.

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood or of manly bonhomie. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life can’t be ignored, however: his tempestuous daughter Katie’s deeply inappropriate boyfriend Ray, for instance, or the sudden appearance of a red circular rash on his hip.