Dark Humor Satire

John Smith is the first person ever sent downstairs due to a mix-up in the paperwork. While this is sorted out, he is assigned to work at Hades' local television station, where he must deal with strange characters and stranger programming. All the more bizarre, he arrived just in time for Founder's Day.

Dr. Frederick Eichner, world-renowned dermatologist, is visited by the entrancingly irritating Felix Treevly who comes to him as a patient and stays as an obsession. Prosaic incidents blossom into bizarre developments with the sharpened reality of dreams as the spectral Mr. Treevly leads the doctor into a series of increasingly weird situations. With the assistance of a drunken private detective, a mad judge, a car crash, a game show called What’s My Disease, and a hashish party, Treevly drives Eichner to madness and mayhem.

Mystical. Weird. Hilarious. It's a tale of idiots. It's a tale of life. A dumb cast of characters you have to see to believe. The surgeon on an acid trip. The lazy Uncle who fuses with his favorite chair. The boy who comes back from the dead for revenge. Bootsy Collins. What do these people have in common? About as much as you have with Kevin Bacon.

Avery Doyle loves vampires; he's read every novel, seen all the movies, and researched the folklore. When his first one-night-stand, Caroline, turns out to be a true vampire on the run, he jumps at the chance to leave his ordinary life and join her as a "child of the night". The honeymoon ends, however, when Caroline's brutal Creator Sebastian enslaves them on his island estate and Avery must confront the dehumanizing reality behind his dreams. In order to survive, Caroline and Avery take their place as servants in Sebastian's household during a gathering of the most powerful vampires on Earth.

If Asher Hearst had a superpower, it would have to be his ability to take a punch, laugh it off, and keep on swinging. So yeah, immortality comes with a few perks. As a college student slash small-time fixer, he's about to take a job that's best left to the pros. A proposition by a dryad to save witches from the Inquisition is a first, but he isn't one to balk when the odds are stacked against him. Especially not while he's drinking on someone else's dime.

The TGSPGoSSP is a bit of a comedic acting troupe. Their 2-Part Trilogy mocks our beloved niches in genre fiction. All three books take the usual shots at the usual suspects, both fantasy and sci-fi. If you like dark, deadpan humor and satire such as Monty Python, this title might be your cup of tea.

On November 9, 1989, Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi officer in the twilight of his career, is deteriorating from a mysterious illness. Alarmed by the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his regular café with whom he is obsessed, he chases a series of clues throughout Berlin. The details of Lara’s vanishing trigger flashbacks to his entanglement with Johannes Held, a physicist who, 25 years earlier, infiltrated an American research institute dedicated to weaponizing the paranormal.

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.

A struggling actress' life gets turned upside down when she witnesses the burial of an urn in her yard. She gets entangled with the "dead girl", a Latina health guru, and her criminal antics from Miami to New York to LA.

The day after an epically hideous and embarrassing disaster, Allison comes to school transformed. Suddenly she's sporting a cute new hairstyle, and she has all the right answers in class. With the help of a strangely wise freshman boy, Jane discovers the unbelievable truth behind the drastic change: Allison has sold her soul to the devil. Now it's up to Jane to put it all on the line to save her friend - without losing her own soul in the process.

To Alice Coggins, the 24-year-old daughter of a South Philadelphia scam artist, everything looks like a racket: endless serf-like internships, student loans that can never be repaid, and high-minded charities run by swindlers for the benefit of rich donors. Things only get worse when she meets Andrew Ogleby, a scion of blue-bloods who is engaged to a bulimic pet-food heiress he can't bring himself to marry. As their Cinderella romance unfolds, Alice and Andrew must battle their families, the mob, and most of all the ubiquitous "Potlatch".

This is a tale with a twist. Unlike what you would hear in other fantasy series, where there's a despotic madman in need of overthrowing where the story follows a group of plucky underdogs, this is a tale focusing on said aforementioned despot as he goes about his business with the express intent of getting a group of plucky rebels to overthrow him. Because what's worse than absolute power? Absolute responsibility.

From an acclaimed and original writer comes a new collection of stories bursting with absurdist plot twists and laced with trenchant wit. The title story delivers a cringingly biting dissection of racial attitudes in contemporary America, and Clarke also turns his eagle eye to subjects like PTSD, the fate of child actors, and, most especially, marital discord in stories like "Considering Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife" and "The Misunderstandings".

Geoff is having a biblically bad day. For a start, his car gets written off and he loses his job at a call center in Manchester. Then the Devil tells him he’s the antichrist and unless he delivers the apocalypse, he’ll be tortured for eternity at a call center in Hell. With the help of the Devil; his best friend, Rob, who turns out to be an infamous duke of Hell; and Mr. Sox, a hellhound trapped in a cat’s body, they are chased by the forces of good, and that’s when all the fun starts….

Set at the fag-end of the 60s at the moment when Swinging London is starting to take on a darker hue in the wake of Charles Manson's murders, and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy Piccadilly-based publisher of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the great oulipo experiments in fiction. It is the story of a psychopath called Raymond Novak and his untimely demise told entirely in 'polari' - a language developed and used mainly amongst the metropolitan homosexual community in the time when being gay was still a criminal offence.

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face.

Cuando la matriarca de la familia judía menos exitosa de Estados Unidos se cansa de su desgracia, consulta los textos místicos en busca de ayuda. Decidida a que su próximo nieto será un genio que cambiará su suerte, y convencida de que nadie en su clan es lo suficientemente inteligente como para criar a un genio por sí mismo, decide que el niño pasará de casa en casa para ganar su sabiduría colectiva.

A car crash 30 years earlier left Slade Bennington severely disabled but with a new outlook on life. His book about overcoming trauma becomes a best seller and a box office hit movie. Slade strikes up an unusual friendship with Schuyler, the six-foot-tall teenage actress who portrays his sister in the movie. She encourages him to continue writing, and his pithy musings about life spur a nationwide following of devotees who study his books like Holy Scriptures.

The suburbs of Par Mars. Two shopping centers, rows of estates and thematically designed neighborhoods. Twenty-four-year-old Leen is going to open an ear-cleaning and massage studio in the Topic Heights Shopping Centre, taking her mother’s Chinese ritual to the West to bring people back to their bodies. But something is not quite right in Par Mars. Managers are being attacked, and when Leen befriends Jean Paul, a pharmacist who is obsessed with a cryptic online forum, she finds herself involved in a community that is intent on disrupting the routines of capitalism in troubling ways.

Skurril, witzig und ironisch: nach dem erfolgreichen ersten Teil "VOLL BEHÄMMERT – Jobchaoten" kommt nun die Fortsetzung "VOLL VEREIST – Skichaoten". Alexander Humbolt hat es endlich geschafft, seine Traumfrau Maike für sich zu gewinnen. Nun steht Weihnachten vor der Tür: Das Fest der Liebe! Kurzerhand geht es in einen spontanen Skiurlaub. Und damit fangen die Probleme für Alex an, denn wer hätte gedacht, dass einige freie Tage so viele Tücken und Fallstricke bereithalten?