I’ve always been a fan of dark comedies. Fargo. Heathers. Fight Club. There’s something about being able to laugh about tragedy that feels both cathartic and as if you might get struck down by lightning. But I also grew up on a steady diet of supernatural horror à la Stephen King, Peter Straub, and early Dean Koontz. So combining the supernatural and dark comedy into my writing seemed like a natural fit. While I’m drawn to dark comedies of all sorts in both fiction and film, I have a soft spot for those with a supernatural element that involves death, either in the literal sense or as a character.
It’s not often you read the opening chapter of a novel (in this case the Prologue) and go back to read it again before continuing with the rest of the novel because you’ve never read anything like it before. And the book just gets better from there. Combine an African culling song with a tortured journalist investigating crib deaths and a heroine real estate agent who sells haunted houses, then put that all in the hands of Chuck Palahniuk, and you have a supernatural horror dark comedy/satire unlike anything you’ll ever read. Except maybe another Chuck Palahniuk novel. After reading this, I was inspired to write Breathers.
Carl Streator is a reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for a soft-news feature. After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It's a 'culling song' - an ancient African spell for euthanizing sick or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies…
Christopher Moore is one of those rare authors who can actually make you laugh out loud, and there are plenty of those moments to be found here. Secondhand store owner and beta-male Charlie Asher becomes a death merchant, retrieving soul vessels before those souls end up in the hands of the forces of darkness. Set in San Francisco, A Dirty Job features a colorful collection of characters that includes Goth teens, Buddhist monks, and the Emperor of San Francisco. This was the first of Moore’s books that I read and it remains one of my favorites.
Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay—until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death.
It's a dirty job. But, hey! Somebody's gotta do it.
San Diego Private Investigator, Brig Ellis, is hired by a wealthy industrialist to help him acquire the final horse in a set of twelve palomino miniatures that once belonged to the last Emperor of China. What begins as a seemingly reasonable assignment quickly morphs into something much more malevolent.
Ten years before What We Do in the Shadows comically imagined what everyday life might be like for vampires, David Sosnowski published Vamped. Set in a world where vampires outnumber humans, the story stars a bloodsucking bachelor bored with his existence and all of the modern vampire conveniences, and inconveniences. Like missing coffee. And chocolate. And sunlight. And not having any more fresh humans to hunt. But when our hero stumbles across a human child, his existence gets complicated. A sharp, smart, charming, and occasionally heart-warming black comedy with an anti-hero who you end up rooting for.
So this vampire walks into a bar...Yes, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it's just another night in the never-ending life of Marty Kowalski. With his trademark slogan -- "There's a sucker born every minute" -- this blood-drinking bachelor has managed to talk half the mortal world into joining the graveyard shift. Now vampires outnumber humans, and Marty is so bored he could die -- again. With modern conveniences like synthetic blood and Mr. Plasma machines, the thrill of the hunt is gone. Especially for Marty, who's starting to wonder if he should just settle down,…
Not only is this novel about death and dying (10,000 times, to be exact), but it also features Death as a main character. So it gets bonus points for hitting both of those marks when it comes to my love of dark comedies about death. But it’s also a story about finding a reason for living, that reason being the aforementioned Death, who just so happens to be the main character’s love interest. It’s complicated. At turns both thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny. Reincarnation stories have always intrigued me and this one does it in a fashion unlike any other.
My book is a collection of monthly Editor-in-Chief letters to the readership of World Neurosurgery, a journal that I edit. Each essay is short and sweet. The letters were written for neurosurgeons but have been re-edited so that they apply to all human beings. They cover topics such as leadership,…
Full disclosure: this is non-fiction, so there isn’t anything supernatural about it. But when it comes to dark comedy and death, Stiff has it in spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. Plus it was instrumental in helping me to research what happens to the human body when it starts to decompose, which I incorporated into Breathers. So I had to include it here. I’ll go out on a limb and say this is one of the funniest books about death you’ll ever read. Also one of the most disgusting and educational. From a body farm dedicated to the study of human decay to cadavers being used as crash test dummies, this book has it all. And when it comes to making science entertaining, Mary Roach is a national treasure.
For two thousand years, cadavers - some willingly, some unwittingly - have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. "Delightful-though never disrespectful" (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should…
When I started writing Breathers in October 2003, I wanted to write a different kind of zombie story. Rather than the stereotypical brain-dead, shambling corpses who craved human flesh, I wondered what it would be like to be a zombie in a society where you weren’t considered human, had no rights, and were constantly carted off by Animal Control. What would your parents think? How would your friends treat you? Could you join a bowling league?
At the time, zombies were typically portrayed as villains, so I flipped the script and made my zombies the protagonists and the humans the antagonists. I wanted to create an unlikely hero the reader could empathize with and cheer for rather than condemn as a monster.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
The Valor of Valhalla series by Martin Kearns is a pulse-pounding dark urban fantasy trilogy that fuses the raw power of Norse mythology with the grit of modern warfare. Set in a world where ancient gods and mythical creatures clash with secret military organizations and rogue heroes, the series follows…
