The best dark comedy books

On the outskirts of a sweltering Texan town among willows, pumpjacks, and peeling wood dwellings, a fifteen-year-old under-achiever becomes the prime suspect for a high school shooting. Vernon Little’s coming-of-age suddenly meets the media, the madness of crowds, and his mother’s unfortunate psychology, as he desperately plots to run to Mexico. This extremely black comedy is an explosion of triggers from early 21st-century culture spun into an adventure that asks: what the hell is really going on?

Undeath is a manageable condition. That's what the media says, anyway: with the help of the miracle life-extension drug, Lazarus, the Undead can retain their humanity and live normal, happy lives. Without it, they become violent, mindless walking corpses. 

Davin Montoya was eager to believe all of that until an accident left him joining the ranks of the freshly deceased himself. Now, keeping his death a secret is the only way to keep his sister out of foster care. To do so, he must venture into the underground society of Unregistered Undead - a dangerous world of drug deals and government resistance. But when their access to Lazarus begins to run dry, the truth starts to unravel...and it's not what anyone expected.

The annual Zombie Pride Parade is set to begin in Sydney’s CBD. Instead of costumed revelers, the streets fill with zombies flooding out from an underground train station and into an unsuspecting public. A brawl erupts and people realize they aren’t just defending themselves, they’re fighting for their lives. 

We follow John’s journey as he flees the carnage and quickly prepares for a bleak and dangerous future. The spread of the undead is concealed by looting and vigilantism as countless zombies swiftly overrun entire suburbs. John’s journey takes him to places we’ve all been, or should make the effort to visit….. coastal and rural Australia. This is the story of an ordinary man who makes use of wit and guile to achieve the seemingly impossible.

"The moment she woke up, her nightmare began..." What would you do if you awakened to find a dangerous stranger in your house? In your bed, next to you? Now your home has become your prison, and your body, a battlefield. How would you hold onto your sanity, your self-esteem, your very soul against someone determined to annihilate all three?

In the psychological thriller Break Her, one woman will find herself in this almost unthinkable situation, and one man will discover that he has finally come up against someone unlike any of those he has destroyed before.

A Man Eating Chicken is a collection of Eric Sporer's short prose and comics, comprising a twisted satire of modern life. Holding up a funhouse mirror to the world, Sporer’s dark brand of humor lampoons the headlines and cultural events of the past decade. Including never-before published pieces and comics, it is sure to help you laugh in the face of the insanity around you. 

This book is exclusively available here.

Family is where you find it when a bizarre car crash leaves two strangers to care for an orphaned baby, a pregnant cat, and the key to a mystery that hits close to home. Sensual but clean, suspenseful but cozy, funny, and endearing. For your next best love story, open The Locke Box. The corresponding music album, Songs from The Locke Box, fleshes out the story in musical snapshots from the character's point of view and is available at my website.

This award-winning darling of literary critics is a raucous tale of a luxury midtown Manhattan hotel. Seen through the eyes of Linda Lane, an unconventional heroine, Five-Star Fleecing strips the veil on the otherwise secret world of high-end hospitality. Escape with laughter into this madcap adventure filled with crazed colleagues, paparazzi, and celebrities. A definite must-read for anyone willing to ROFLMAO.

It’s about consensual spanking as foreplay. Hose down the neighbours, retire the back rub, this is more sexy than a massage,  more sensual, more visceral, more tactile. Spank is also a laugh-out-loud comedy, with quirky characters and bizarre scenarios involved in the improbable adventures of a middle-aged retired civil servant, and the desires of a beautiful Cambridge graduate with a dark sexual past.

Where else will you meet a titled lady who makes pornographic movies, an aspiring Hollywood movie actress who sells telephone sex; a librarian with a sideline of entertaining ‘assertive older gentlemen’; and a dominatrix at a posh S&M club who really wants to be a ballet dancer.

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.

Mom Walks: Starting in 5th is the first book in a four-book women’s fiction series that follows a mom and her two best mom friends as they navigate the craziness of parenting tweens. The books are light, relatable, and heart-warming stories about mother-daughter relationships, mom friendships, and parenting tweens through issues like mean girl drama, first crushes, materialism, and cell phones. The series is sometimes described as The Baby-Sitters Club, but for moms.