Showing titles in Dark Humor

Something bad happened last night. My best friend Posey is dead. The police think it was a tragic accident. I know she was murdered. But I can’t remember a thing. I’ve woken up with the hangover from hell, a stranger in my bed, and I’ve gone viral for the worst reasons. There’s only thing stopping me from dying of shame. I need to find a killer.

Chief Inspector Brian Hooley has a plan, and it won't make him popular. He wants to bring back autistic detective Jonathan Roper. Currently suspended on misconduct charges, his condition, coupled with a relentless work ethic, makes Roper a unique investigator with observational skills that allow him to see what others miss. But he is also a complex man who doesn't get social boundaries, and plenty of his colleagues just don't like him. Hooley doesn't care about that. He knows Roper is the one to make a difference.

Recently dumped and stuck with a mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi’s husband, Bryce, trace the Duncan’s 25-year marriage.

All 10 episodes of the dark, surreal comedy featuring Matt Berry's twisted regression therapist. Unorthodox, unpredictable and verging on the unprofessional, Dr Berry is a deeply disturbing hypnotherapist. His experimental regressive technique is both strange and terrifying and involves taking unsuspecting clients on unsettling journeys through their subconscious.

Flynn is stuck - depressed, recently dumped, and living at his mom’s house. The supermarket was supposed to change all that. An ordinary job and a steady check. Work isn’t work when it’s saving you from yourself. But things aren’t quite as they seem in these aisles. Arriving to work one day to a crime scene, Flynn’s world collapses as the secrets of his tortured mind are revealed. And Flynn doesn’t want to go looking for answers at the supermarket. Because something there seems to be looking for him.

From the best-selling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments - one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz, Charis, and Tony - university classmates decades ago - were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives.

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

You probably already know my name. Lucy Chase, the woman who doesn’t remember murdering her best friend. Even though they couldn’t find enough evidence to charge me, I know you all think I did it. That’s OK. I realise being found wandering the streets the next day covered in her blood wasn't a great look. Believe me, I’m as frustrated as you are. I’d love to know if I’m a murderer – it’s the sort of thing you really should know about yourself, isn’t it? And now, thanks to true-crime podcast Listen for the Lie, I finally have the chance to find out.

Richard Brautigan's world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, that wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways, and that ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration.

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur 90 years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed.

In a dingy office in Fisherman's Wharf, the glass panel in the door bears the names of A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean. Private Eyes. Behind the door there is only one desk, one chair, one scrawny androgynous P.I. in a tank top and skimpy waistcoat. A.Z., as they are collectively known, are twin brother and sister. He's pure misanthropic logic, she's wild hedonistic creativity. The Kimreans have been locked in mortal battle since they were in utero...which is tricky because they, very literally, share one single body. That's right. One body, two pilots.

Raj and Rachel Ranjani have invited a small group of their “ride or dies” from college for a celebratory weekend in Napa Valley. On the agenda: three nights in the couple’s vineyard mansion, a lavish dinner at Napa’s hottest new restaurant, exclusive tastings, and the grand opening of the Ranjanis’ ultra-high-end winery. It’s a reunion of six friends who haven’t seen each other in years. What could go wrong?

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.

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.

When Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date, she turns to her aunties for help. Their meddling set her up on the date, so they kind of owe her. Although hiding this goddamn dead body is going to be harder than they thought especially when her family’s wedding business has the biggest wedding of the year happening right now.

Maud Drennan is a dedicated caretaker, but her sunny, capable disposition and snappy quips mask a deep sadness. A tragic childhood event left her in the company of a cast of patron saints who pop in and out of her life like unwelcome tourists. She tries to find solace in her hard work in London...but then she meets the inimitable Mr. Flood. A menace by all accounts, Cathal Flood is a widower living alone in a Gothic Dorset mansion crawling with collector's items and feral cats.

Meet Samuel: stalled writer, bored teacher at a local college, obsessive player of online video games. He hasn't seen his mother, Faye, in decades, not since she abandoned her family when he was a boy. Now she has suddenly reappeared, having committed an absurd politically motivated crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a divided America. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.

Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Celine's influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction.

Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade. Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there’s a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punch line will either get you to a punch line or force you to be one. They’re all afraid to be one.

Twenty-four-year-old Megan may have her whole life ahead of her, but it already feels like a dead end, thanks to her dreadful job as a gastroenterologist's receptionist and her heart-clogging resentment of the success and happiness of everyone around her. But no one stokes Megan's bitterness quite like her coworker, Jillian, a grotesquely optimistic, 35-year-old single mother whose chirpy positivity obscures her mounting struggles.