Dark Comedy Short Stories

Seal Island is home to a moonshine-making billionaire, a pot-growing fisherman, a celebrity flower child, a handsome romance writer, a sex-addicted realtor, a womanizing pub owner, a cop, a pot-bellied pig…and a serial killer. The island is serene and remote. It is only accessible by boat. The residents like it that way, until those with the deepest and darkest of secrets start dying in the most bizarre of ways.

This is a collection of the first six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series. It includes "Cave of the Kobolds"; "Zombie Attack"; "Orcs, Bears, and Assholes"; "Shipfaced"; "Dungeon Crawl"; and "The Creep on the Borderlands".

This is a collection of the second six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series.

Rachel Klein never meant to kiss her creative writing professor, but with his long eyelashes, his silky hair, and the sad, beautiful life he laid bare on Twitter, she does, and the kiss is very nice. Zahid Azzam never planned to become a houseguest in his student's sprawling Connecticut home, but with the sparkling swimming pool, the endless supply of Whole Foods strawberries, and Rachel's beautiful mother, he does, and the home is very nice.

Do you love horror stories? The type of stories that you read to your children to warn them about the horrors of the night? Are you a newcomer to the genre, or are you a veteran that has already went through the raunchiest most devastating stories out there already? Well then, this is the perfect midnight “snack” for you.

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.

In this darkly comic and surreal collection from celebrated author Alissa Nutting, misfit women scramble for agency in a series of uncanny circumstances. Throughout these breathtakingly creative 17 stories spread across time, space, and differing planes of reality, we encounter a host of women and girls in a wide range of unusual jobs. A space cargo deliverywoman enlists the help of her cybersex partner to release her mother from cryogenic prison.

This is a collection of short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series. It includes the following titles: "They Fight Three Giants", "From the Bowels of Hell Hounds", "Tossing the Salaad", "The Fuccubus", "Fistin' the Furious", and "Pixie Dicks".

A funny and heartwarming debut for fans of Celia Imrie and Dawn French. Evie Gallagher is regretting her hasty move into a care home. She may be 75 and recently widowed, but she’s absolutely not dead yet. And so, one morning, Evie walks out of Sheldon Lodge and sets off on a Great Adventure across Europe. But not everyone thinks Great Adventures are appropriate for women of Evie’s age, least of all her son, Brendan, and his wife, Maura, who follow a trail of puzzling text messages to bring her home.

There is a general belief that books give a wider room for imaginations - even wider than the room that watching a movie affords you, and truthfully so. These tales, when listened to in the dark, will leave you with much to imagine - an arm covered in goose bumps and the back of your neck with all the hackles on their ends. The curtains you see might not be curtains. The mirrors, too, might become home to many faces and the old man by the road might not be what you think he is. Welcome to the home of scary and macabre tales.

In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures up a bleak world populated by hardscrabble pugilists, fighting dogs, sex addicts, and others held captive by their own bad luck and bad decisions. Visceral and with a dark urgency, Rust and Bone is a strikingly original debut.

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.

An accountant by day, Mr. Rodgers spends his nights and weekends indulging in a unique passion. Traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood as an unknown entity, he uses unconventional methods to help long-suffering wives rediscover the love they once had for themselves and their husbands. Some might consider him a selfless hero, ahead of his time. The residents of Poagstown, however, have cutting-edge ideas of their own.

Nobody likes getting bullied, and Donny has had enough. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, he solicits the help of the old Asian man at the end of his street to teach him Karate. During a grueling two days of training, Donny earns belt after belt, until he finally becomes a Karate Master.

The characters in this extraordinary book are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. Two professors of philosophy turn pugilists; Leith removal men become the objects of desire for Hollywood goddesses; God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; and in the novella, 'A Smart Cunt', the drug-addled young hero spins off on a collision course with his past.

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.

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.

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.

It was, maybe, the first job I'd ever had where people were happy to see me. An odd feeling indeed, to wield this kind of power. To be this kind of force. As near to magical as any mortal should stride. A technician of unspeakable joy. Braving the neon mountains to return with blue raspberry concentrate. Tearing out sundae cone fangs from the mouths of snow beasts. And so on.

An urgent and unforgettable collection of stories, Show Them a Good Time explores types - men and women, their assigned roles and meanings - in modern society. A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York; two hapless university students take to the stage in a bid to assert their autonomy; a school teacher makes her way through a series of dead-end dates, gamely searching for love or distraction as the world teeters towards ruin.