Dark Comedy Short Stories

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.

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.

Sie lieben sich, sie hassen und sie töten sich – mit Alpenveilchen, Christrosen oder Eisenhut denn gegen alle(s) ist ein tödliches Kraut gewachsen, egal, ob ausgediente Ehemänner, alte Widersacher, verhasste Haustiere oder nervende Nachbarn. Wenn böse Menschen die hohe Kunst der botanischen Giftmischerei zelebrieren, wird es mörderisch spannend – bis zum letzten Blatt.

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.

Meet a cat called Cecilia, a disgruntled android named Doris, and a weasel called Popgoes and discover that with enough tea and dark chocolate you can achieve anything.

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.

Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.

It’s bad enough that its venom-dripping chelicerae can slice through flesh like warm butter. Worse? It’s right there under the bunk. It’s a fact now. To make it through the night, the children must obey the rules: don’t get out of bed, stay out of the shadows, and don’t wake the beast. But as the threats multiply, so do the rules of survival. And with the safety of dawn still hours away, the fun is just beginning.

There is a distinct surreal quality to some (including "Exposure" and "And Now Let's Have Some Fun"), a strong sense of irony (as in "You Too Can Graduate in Three Years with an Advanced Degree in Contextual Semiotics"), and moments of awkward and therefore very real grapplings with sex and romance (most especially in "The Rescues" and the title story, "Welcome Thieves").

In search of the ferocious truth, some would call trying to channel the spirit of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson a fool’s errand. But these are desperate times. So settle in for this trilogy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers from John Bruni (Tales of Questionable Taste), Kent Hill (Hercules with a Shotgun) and Kevin Candela (Weedeaters: The Complete Acropalypse) as they bring you just what the doctor ordered.

"Stranger's Thing" by Robert Bevan: Four friends get more than they bargained for when they break into a seemingly abandoned research lab. "The Shingling" by Steve Wetherell: Johnny Terry, a recovering meth addict, is excited to start his new life as the caretaker at the Underpass Motel. Unfortunately, the Underpass is haunted by the ghosts of dead porn stars. "The Haunting of Whore House" by Robert Bevan: Lucy and her brother, Junkie, find out that moving was only the beginning of their troubles when they encounter the ghost of a little boy in the woods. Plus three more!

Tales from the Eerie Canal weaves the sinister mystery of Edgar Allan Poe with the dark humor of Edward Gorey. No canal. No Lake Erie. Just a stream of the disturbing splashed with bits of the absurd.

Set in the author’s native Belfast, the ten stories in Sweet Home lay bare the heartbreak and quiet tragedies that run under the surface of everyday lives. A lonely woman is fascinated by her niqab-wearing neighbours; a middle-aged teacher becomes obsessed with a young Gaelic football player; and an employer covers for his two employees caught having sex in a public toilet.

"J'ai commencé à éprouver un sentiment, je veux dire un vrai, à ce moment-là. En sortant de la voiture, à Wandermines, sous la pluie. On ne parle pas assez de l'influence des lieux sur l'affect. Certaines nostalgies remontent à la surface sans prévenir. Les êtres changent de nature, comme dans les contes. Au milieu de cette confrérie en habits du dimanche, se pressant vers la mairie pour échapper aux gouttes, tenant le bras d'Odile pour l'aider sur le parvis glissant, j'ai éprouvé la catastrophe du sentiment.

Kate and Michael, twenty-something housemates working at the same Trader Joe’s supermarket, are thoroughly screwed when people start turning into zombies at their house party in the Oakland hills. The zombie plague is a sexually transmitted disease, turning its victims into shambling, horny, voracious killers.

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.

Death. It’s a part of life and something we all must accept. Whether it be our own demise or losing a loved one, the experience of death is both sobering and surreal. My Dad Is Dead is a group of related short stories that explore that dichotomy through the eyes of a kid. In George Verongos’ second book, he turns childhood memories into “fictionally enhanced” tales (he made us say that, he’s trying to make it a thing).

Tony Hunt, author of 'Geordie Boy - small events in a child's life', has taken a darker turn with this collection of short stories, centred around the volunteers who work in a Lake District charity shop. The five stories are linked in parallel; each story standing alone, but as you listen to each one, a fuller picture appears of the strains and stresses that afflict people who have retired to the Lakes to seek serenity, but instead find themselves at the mercy of events.

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.

This is a humorous, episodic novel of dark fantasy and science fiction, composed of the four novellas Amy and the Ankylosaurus, Helen and the Evil Elves of the Elder Gods, Sithe in the City, and Dragon vs Dinosaur. It begins when Magnus creates a device to open portals to other quantum universes so he can show his ex-girlfriend, Amy, real dinosaurs. This goes awry when Amy goes through the portal and he has to rescue her, accompanied by his fellow scientist Helen, Amy's best friend.