Dark Comedy Short Stories

Family. Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em...or can you? When Family of the Year award winners Constance Winslow and her father pick the day of the award ceremony to give in to years of mutual loathing, things aren’t looking good for Constance. That’s when she decides to draft her neighbor. She’s got a plan, all she needs is a little help. If only her neighbor didn’t have a plan of his own...

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success.

In the town of Name Pending, Wyoming, Elijah Potbury does brisk business as the territory's only practicing necromancer. For a reasonable fee, he'll raise any friend or family member. Stories contained in this volume: "The Automatons Who Ate Lead": After convincing Potbury to resurrect two disembodied brains that are to be transplanted into automatons, the diabolical Mr. Seven uses them to kidnap Miss Henrietta. Potbury, with the help of his faithful gun hand, the late Nat McGrue, does everything in his power to thwart the scheming airship owner. "The Hatching of the Wolf Spider": The Wolf ...

In the town of Name Pending, Wyoming, Elijah Potbury does brisk business as the territory's only practicing necromancer. For a reasonable fee, he'll raise any friend or family member. Stories contained in this third volume: "A Long Way From Name Pending": A traveler from the future is shot and killed in the town of Name Pending, leaving behind a small triangular prism containing a composite of all the collected known knowledge of the twenty-second century. Mr. Seven and most of the townspeople will seemingly stop at nothing to possess it. "Subterranean Sojourn": Mr. Seven journeys deep ...

This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It's the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass - a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams' characters, however, are like the rest of us.

What can one say about the 'jokey' content within these pages? Well, it provides no more than an opportunity for the author to smirk, in a quite mad fashion, and ensure that his readership will continue to bestow solitary heavenly bodies on his foul, pointless conjurings. You see, it's all rather funny... to him.

In the town of Name Pending, Wyoming, Elijah Potbury does brisk business as the territory's only practicing necromancer. For a reasonable fee, he'll raise any friend or family member. Stories contained in this fourth volume: "The Ravenous Man-Eater": Mr. Seven, owner of the airship Azincourt, assigns Professor Hemplewick the task of creating a many-tentacled, armor-plated monstrosity in the form of a giant slug to work in the engine room of the Azincourt. A reanimated human brain from a freshly deceased corpse is needed to power the creature, for which Seven turns to Potbury. Aware of ...

A collection of stories: The Possessed Printer Blues: A woman buys a printer at a yard sale. The Long Day Sun: A photography student helps out a friend. Savory Taro Pudding: A short nightmare based on true events. Billionaire Babies: It turns out you can't trust billionaires. Bath Salts Vampire: Teen girls with low self-esteem + a drug dealer who thinks he's an ancient vampire. What could go wrong?

It’s just another morning on the fifth of July. The country is another year older; Gus is a touch hungover, the coffee in his office is stale, and all Gus wants to do is go home and start over again on July sixth. Unfortunately Father Xavier visits the sheriff’s office and he’s brought along a gift. He has a green jacket that should have been put in the church’s lost and found. The father suspects it belongs to a missing girl named Erica Torres which is odd given the jacket is marked as belonging to E. Rossi. Erica went to school one day and never came home. She was picked up by a ...

From bourgeois facial-hair trends to parental sleep deprivation, Joseph O’Neill closely observes the mores of his characters, whose vacillations and second thoughts expose the mysterious pettiness, underlying violence, and, sometimes, surprising beauty of ordinary life in the early 21st century. A lonely wedding guest talks to a goose; two poets struggle over whether to participate in a “pardon Edward Snowden” verse petition; a cowardly husband lets his wife face a possible intruder in their home; a potential co-op renter in NYC can’t find anyone to give him a character reference.

Have you ever been married to a demon…I mean, a narcissist? No? Well, let me tell you about it, and it ain’t going to be pretty. Grab a glass of wine—trust me, you'll need it. I’d always been drawn to the charismatic types. You know the kind—loud, brimming with confidence, and always wearing a smile that could charm the Satan himself. Little did I know, I was about to sign a lifelong blood contract with one who truly might. Now, being married to a narcissist is a lot like organizing a circus. At first, you’re thrilled to be part of something that excites so many people; then you...

In the spirit of those hilarious 80s and 90s comedy spoofs, get ready for Naked Noir! Picture Jim Cummings, a washed-up detective stuck in a lover's waltz. When Jane, the damsel in distress, storms in one dark and stormy night, Jim's in for a rollercoaster ride. Her beau's been offed, and guess who's got to untangle this mess? You got it – Jim, our reluctant hero. But wait, there's more! A shadowy assassin lurks, determined to throw a wrench in Jim's detective work. Can Jim crack the case and save his own bacon (mmm bacon) before he's next on the hit list? Will he unveil the sneaky killer...

ROMANTIC LIES (BOOK 2) Five years after coming to New York for her cousin Emma's funeral, Abby has it all: the man of her dreams, a well-paying job, and a luxury apartment that she shares with her billionaire boyfriend. Little does she know that Liam has been keeping a secret from her...one that could ruin things forever. When he suddenly ends their relationship without any explanation, Abby's beautiful world comes crashing down. Her best friend, Isabella, gives her a clue that might explain everything, and Abby sets out on a journey to solve the mystery of why Liam left. What she discovers...

Eight short stories about art, shadows and self. Creighton's second short story collection introduces us to a gallery owner who worries her husband will leave her for a doppelgänger; an artist whose creativity is blocked by intense fear on a retreat; a would-be writer who opens a PO Box to gather other people's letters to God; two mothers with guilty secrets; a young student contemplating suing a lecturer for boring her into deep slumber; a geologist travelling the earth to find herself; and a woman who flies home to bury her dead uncle, only to end up in a compromising situation. ...

A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage times; it was time for something else. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal.

Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette break; a man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart. With the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own, Tolstaya transmutes the quotidian into aetherial alternatives.

Bleak Punchline Joke Book set the bar somewhere in the dirt and lost it. Bleak Punchline Joke Book II accidently came across the bar again and buried it deep in the grubby earth. Bleak Punchline Joke Book III, the final act of humourless hubris in the trilogy, forgets about the bar altogether and settles for the dirt. If you have endured Sammy Madden’s musings so far, feel free to repent and absolve yourself of wrongdoing, or, if that doesn’t suit your intellect, please, by all means, lie down and roll around with the remaining swine.

After a failed petition to change his career, Bill, the local pottery maker and town drunk, is coerced by his neighbors and king to join an expedition to hunt down and slay a mighty dragon that plagues their village.

When God descends to earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie's provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God's demise.

ROMANCE QUICKIES Discounted Boxed Set, Encounters 7-12 WHO WILL WIN? Seven friends living in New York City. One unusual competition. Who can have the most intimate encounters in a month? Ten thousand dollars is on the line... Quickies are bite-sized steamy stories that follow a group of women living in New York City who compete to see who can have the most casual hookups in a month. Which woman will sleep with the most men to win the bet? Will any of them fall in love with their conquests along the way? These sizzling-hot books can be read as stand-alones or as part of the Quickies series. ...