Dark Humor

From author Rupert Holmes comes a devilish thriller with a killer concept: The McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts, a luxurious, clandestine college dedicated to the fine art of murder where earnest students study how best to “delete” their most deserving victim....

Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate....

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....

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him....

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one....

Drunk customers. Shoplifting raccoons. Otherworldly visitors. As night shift clerk at the 24-hour gas station at the edge of town, Jack has pretty much seen it all....

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC. But there are rules....

Jack is back to work, trying his best to keep out of trouble. But when his chain-smoking coworker discovers a mysterious radio signal revealing the guarded secrets of their town, Jack will learn that an annoying new dayshift manager is far from the worst of his problems....

You'd Look Better as a Ghost follows the trials and tribulations of Claire, a part-time serial killer, who is keen to keep her favorite hobby a secret—despite the efforts of a determined blackmailer....

Gwen Turner has made a bloody mess of her life. She recently broke up with the best man she’s ever known for reasons even she can’t admit to herself. Along with too much cheap wine and bad reality TV, Gwen turns to a dating app to help fill the void in her life....

Victor Mancini, a medical school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: He pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants....

Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief....

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod....

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits....

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal....

Swords. Sorcery. Dick Jokes. Truly do the gods smile upon you, dear listener, for the first four books in the hilarious Caverns and Creatures series are now available in one audiobook set. Join Tim, Dave, Julian, and Cooper as they are thrown into a hostile fantasy world....

Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars....

Bart is 30. He is bald. He is overweight. He wears glasses. He is a fry cook. He hates cats. And kids. Bart occasionally does very bad things. He is looking for his perfect match. He has done his research....

A dark comedy about four women coming together to heal the damage their husbands have done–and hide their bodies once they’ve killed them....

Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps....

Gilda, a 20-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church....

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service.....

Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs—a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart....

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales....

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre....

Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up 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 punchline will either get you to a punchline or force you to be one. They’re all afraid to be one.

It's 2017, and the crisis of forced disappearances has reached a tipping point after forty-three docent students disappeared and are feared dead. Aureliano Más the Second is a fledgling writer at a lucrative fellowship in Mexico City chaired by his aunt, Rose.

Meet Charles™, the latest in robot servant technology. Programmed to undertake the most menial household chores, Charles is loyal, efficient and logical to a fault. That is, until a rather large fault causes him to murder his owner. Understandably perplexed, Charles finds himself without a master – therefore worthless in a society utterly reliant on artificial labour and services.

When friends Louise and Irina find a dead body in the local park whilst walking their dogs, they are soon drawn into the mystery of who murdered local entrepreneur Phil Creasey. Phil used to be a member of their dog walking community – nicknamed The Pack – until the death of his cockapoo, and The Pack feel they owe it to Phil to investigate his death. With Louise and Irina leading the charge, they soon come up against local drug dealers, stolen cars and a disturbing incident of poisoned dog biscuits.

Tommo has just started at a new school—a training ground for the Scottish elite—when his friend Johnnie's brother is found dead in a Land Rover on a Highland farm. There's a shotgun at his feet. Nobody seems clear about what has happened, least of all Tommo. A child of the middle class, and with new independence thrust upon him, Tommo finds himself invited into fading crumbling houses. It's the early nineties and this elite is struggling for relevance. Alienated from the mainstream, and running low on inherited wealth, his peers have retreated into snobbery and fatalism.

Conor is a recent graduate from a law school no one has heard of. Without any job prospects and needing to support his chronically ill mother, he takes a summer job teaching tennis at the affluent gated community of Cutters Neck, Massachusetts. One of his first students is Catherine, a magnetic divorcée keen to hire him for more than advice on her serve. What begins as a transactional arrangement soon develops into an intoxicating sexual relationship. Things become even more complicated when Conor encounters Emily, with whom he has his first taste of real intimacy.

When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals. What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker - or sexier - would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee?

Kay and Matt—disenfranchised, manic depressive pagan deity assassins, cult busters, and office drones, real "all-in-one" employees of the clandestine, Pan-Abrahamaic conglomerate known as CrossTech. You might conjure up an exciting, high-octane fantasy over such a profession, but in reality they are not so different from you. They mostly file reports, attend seemingly pointless meetings, and have to explain every decision they dare make outside of the chain of command to an uncaring, angelic manager, and his self-important, weaselly assistant.

From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York City’s glitziest neighborhood, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty with plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knock-offs, doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic, sinister founder and CEO.

We meet our ill-tempered protagonist—the story’s titular “brat”—at a low moment, but not yet at rock bottom. The Gabriel of the novel is mourning the death of his father as well as a recent breakup and struggling to finish writing his second book. Alone and aimless, he agrees to move back into his parents’ house to clear it out for sale. Here, the clichés end.

Liz Millanova has stage four cancer, a grown daughter who doesn’t speak to her, and obsessive memories of a relationship that tore apart her marriage.

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: free lodging in a guest cottage in exchange for tennis lessons, luxuriously far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

A year has passed since Ari gave birth to Walker, though it went so badly awry she has trouble calling it “birth” and still she can't locate herself in her altered universe. Amid the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights and another impending winter in upstate New York, Ari is a tree without roots, struggling to keep her branches aloft. When Mina, a one-time cult musician—older, self-contained, alone, and nine-months pregnant—moves to town, Ari sees the possibility of a new friend, despite her unfortunate habit of generally mistrusting women.

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with 18-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life. Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales - many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes. But beneath the surface of the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral surface of the farm, something darker and less harmonic starts to vibrate.

Lauren, Saskia, Dominica, Farah and Tansy have been friends since nursery. They wonder if that was the last time they all actually liked each other. Reunited as bridesmaids at Tansy's spiritual hen party in the woods, it doesn't take long before old grudges begin to surface. Not to mention the secret they've been hiding for twenty years. But what starts as a weekend of macramé and penis straws ends in murder when Tansy chokes to death on a poisoned cacao. And as the body count keeps climbing, the friends realise that one of their group must be the killer - and they need to watch their backs.