検索キーワード： ダークユーモア

Molly Gray wears her Head Maid badge proudly for every shift at the Regency Grand Hotel, plumping pillows, sweeping up the guests’ secrets, silently restoring rooms to a state of perfection. But when a renowned guest – a famous mystery writer – drops very dead in the grand tea room, Molly has an unusual clean-up on her hands. As rumours and suspicion swirl in the hotel corridors, it’s clear there’s grime lurking beneath the gilt. And Molly knows that she alone holds the key to the mystery.

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. That is, until his best friend reveals the body of a local politician hidden in the trunk of a car, setting off a chain of events with apocalyptic potential. Soon, Jack finds himself entangled in a supernatural conspiracy involving monster hunters, sociopaths, doomsday cultists, and...garden gnomes?

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

At sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction...

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.

Trauma nurse Aly escapes her hard-working days by thirsting after masked men online. To her, nothing could top the fantasy of her favorite tattooed and masked man hunting her down. But she never could have guessed that one drunken text would turn those dreams into reality . . .Josh has spent his life avoiding the limelight, but his online persona is another story. At night, he posts masked thirst traps for his millions of fans, until one follower catches his eye: Aly.

Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting). He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person).

Life with a living partner can be tricky. But the #1 dating app in the world, LIV, offers a solution! Date a corpse. Romantic relationships mean having tough conversations and rough patches. An embalmed body, though? Well, they’ve got no opinions, desires, or complex emotional responses. What was once taboo is now a booming business. At the heart of this deranged app are three living, breathing humans who all feel quite differently about the new world they’ve built.

A dark comedy wrapped in a techno thriller's skin, Mal Goes to War provides a satirical take on war, artificial intelligence, and what it really means to be human.

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.

Dwayne Devero is just like you and me, except he simply doesn’t give a sh*t anymore. He’s had enough. He’s done with people living life wrong. You’ll do it right, or he’ll bury you under the bases at the ballpark where he coaches. It’s just that simple. Tired of poor decisions being made all around him, from the politics of player positions on his son’s little league baseball team to the philandering of his wife in his own bedroom, Dwayne decides that breaking is better than bending.

Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina's relationship with her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention....

In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents) and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.

A young woman takes stock after the burglary of her apartment. A teenager becomes obsessed with the obituaries in a weekly magazine. Grandchildren mourn the grandparents who loved them and the grandparents who didn’t. Painters and almost-painters try to distinguish Good Art from Bad Art. People grapple with life-altering illness, unrequited love, and promises they have every intention of keeping. Some win the lottery. Others don’t.

Der Eigenbrötler Nicol liebt nichts mehr als die malerische kleine Bucht samt Cottage und Bootshaus, die er auf der Hebriden-Insel Gigha gepachtet hat. Ausgerechnet dort will nun der beliebte schottische Schauspieler und Regisseur Jim McKechnie seinen neuen Film drehen. Als McKechnie Nicol androht, seine Kontakte spielen zu lassen, um Nicol von seinem geliebten Fleckchen Erde zu vertreiben, kommt es zu einem wüsten Streit zwischen den beiden Männern. Am nächsten Morgen spült das Meer Nicol eine Überraschung vor die Haustür: eine männliche Leiche im Kilt. McKechnie?

When the man calling himself Archie Leach begins spotting his dead lover at random locations around the city, he must finally stop running and face the truth—which may not be quite as he's remembered it all these years. An American living in Australia, Archie's had so many aliases that when he wakes up handcuffed to a hospital bed, he almost forgets which one he's supposed to use. With his delivery job derailed by a brief and inconvenient death, he's earned the wrath of his underworld boss, landing him an exorbitant repayment plan and the commandeering of his apartment.

As the assistant of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Nicole Underwood has plenty of tasks on her to-do list—one of which is the blowout birthday celebration for her nightmare, one-percenter boss, Xander Chambers. But when the party ends in chaos and murder and Nicole is one of the survivors, suspicion—from the investigators to the media—lands on her. Was she the reason for all the bloodshed? A year after those deadly events, Nicole tries to set the public record straight by agreeing to consult on a feature film based on her story.

Fran Donoghue has just killed her neighbour. Don’t worry, you’ll agree, he deserved it. Detective Gareth Donoghue has a terrible feeling about his missing neighbour. By the time this is over, that will be the least of his worries… A dark, sharp and hilarious novel about love, marriage, and murder, with an ending you won’t see coming… Gareth certainly didn’t.

It's 2011 and Esther is living her best life, according to her Facebook posts. Sure her marriage is falling apart and her job is going nowhere, but at least everyone thinks she's happy. The truth is, the only thing keeping her going is Canadian actor, Ted Levy, and the fan site where her and the 'Tedettes' stalk his every move. When Ted gets a new celebrity girlfriend, Esther decides that things have gone far enough. She walks out on her life and buys a one-way ticket to Canada. After all, Ted might not know it yet, but they are meant to be together – he just needs a little bit of persuading.

Die 48-jährige Liv ist Ehefrau, Mutter, Küchenplanerin und – nachdem ihre erste Hitzewallung eine tödliche Kettenreaktion auslöst: Mörderin. Jetzt schläft Liv nicht mehr nur wegen des Hormonmangels schlecht, sondern auch wegen ihrer Schuldgefühle. Bleibt nur eins, um Ruhe zu finden: Liv muss ihre Einstellung ändern, ein positives Mindset erarbeiten. Ausgerechnet eine Exprostituierte und ihre Schwiegermutter helfen ihr dabei. Unglücklicherweise kommt es trotz aller Bemühungen zu weiteren Morden – aber wenigstens stehen ihr die beiden dabei mit einem positiven Mindset zur Seite.