Showing titles in Dark Humour

It's 1998. The Internet age is still in its infancy. Google has just been founded. Eighteen-year-old supermarket shelf-stacker Nigel Carmelite has decided that he's going to become a vigilante. There are a few problems: how is he going to even find crime to fight on the streets of Derbyshire? How will he create a superhero costume - and an arsenal of crime-fighting weaponry - on a shoestring budget?

Mark Renton is a very sick young man. He's sick of heroin and sick of trying to get off it but, above all, Renton is thoroughly sick of himself. What with vampire ghost babies, exploding siblings and disatorous sexual encounters, it's pain to see why Renton gloomily contends that 'life does not get any easier'.

Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn't want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family's big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she's certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield-Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route. But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn.

Kieran's love life didn't get off to a good start. He threw up after his first kiss; he was beaten up by the first girl to have a crush on him; and after a mix-up with his first love letter, he could only sit back and watch as the entire school mistook him for a brutal murderer. By the time the hormones kicked in, Kieran had all but given up on love, but the worst was yet to come.

Edward is throwing a dinner party with Binny, his mistress. Aware that she has long been denied those small intimacies that his wife takes for granted – choosing a birthday present for his sister, for example, or sorting his socks – he wants to give her a chance to feel more involved in his life, to socialise with some of his friends (the discreet ones). Things are a little awkward to begin with, but everything seems to be going well. Then some uninvited and rather forceful guests arrive, and it doesn’t look like Edward is going to make it home on time…

The lifestyles, careers, romances, and peccadillos of various British intellectuals, scientists, and artists are dealt with - often with hilarity and sometimes with dark comedy and sophisticated banter. All of this is set off by the ingenious idea of self-inflating pants!

Brought to you by Penguin. John Self is a consumer extraordinaire. Rolling between London and New York he closes movie deals and spends feverishly, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography and mountains of junk food. But John's...

The only location for millions of souls is Limbo, an ever expanding sphere of metal no longer deep under the Swiss mountains. Death itself is on hold and something must be done to stop the tide and avoid the final endgame. John Hewson will yet again be drawn in to the battle to save humanity. It's third on his to do list behind finding the other parts of his soul and removing an ever increasingly paranoid pigeon.

Tantor Audio presents six must-listen stories from the horror comedy series Shingles.... Shingles Audio Collection Volume 2 begins with "Terror on Hypo Beach", in which a family vacation turns out to be anything but ordinary. In "Put Your Hand in My Ass", Will needs a mentor for the upcoming high school talent show. What he gets is Sloppy - an enchanted puppet with weird sexual proclivities and an extremely problematic approach to comedy. 

First story in a collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season Billy Partridge wasn’t really cut out to be a cat burglar, but it was ‘do the job, or come up with thirteen grand by Thursday, or have both legs shattered’. ‘Do...

Palahniuk’s fashion-model protagonist has it all - boyfriend, career, loyal best friend - until an accident destroys her face, her ability to speak, and her self-esteem. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a bona fide woman.  

Connor McKnight, former acolyte of film, Zen, and Japanese literature, is not unaware that these avocations are wildly different from his present occupation as a fledgling celebrity journalist. Meanwhile, his longtime girlfriend, the fashion model Philomena, seems curiously remote and soon decamps for the West Coast. Then there's the sister with whom he shared a flamboyantly addled childhood and his best friend, a monkishly neurotic and militantly vegetarian writer.

A dark and unexpected novel about a Dublin undertaker who finds himself on the wrong side of the Irish mob. Paddy Buckley is a grieving widower who has worked for years for Gallagher’s, a long-established—some say the best—funeral home in Dublin. One night driving home after an unexpected...

Read by actor Alex Jennings, Some Hope is the third of Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical series, The Patrick Melrose Novels, filmed for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic addict, Patrick. Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a...

The internationally acclaimed #1 bestselling thriller, now in English. This program features multicast narration. “This rollercoaster of a novel is highly imaginative and totally unique. I devoured it — no pun intended! — in one sitting. By turns gory, shocking, macabre and often very...

Thermonuclear war erupts in Kerry Shale's award-winning 1993 dramatisation of the classic apocalyptic black comedy. Dr Strangelove came to prominence in the 1964 film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George, it famously starred Peter Sellers in multiple roles. As well as scripting the dramatisation, Kerry Shale also takes multiple roles: Dr Strangelove, Lieutenant 'Sweets' Kivel, Lieutenant Barney Goldberg, Lieutenant Lothar Zogg, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, General Jack D. Ripper and President Merkin Muffley.

Set at the fag-end of the 60s at the moment when Swinging London is starting to take on a darker hue in the wake of Charles Manson's murders, and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy Piccadilly-based publisher of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the great oulipo experiments in fiction. It is the story of a psychopath called Raymond Novak and his untimely demise told entirely in 'polari' - a language developed and used mainly amongst the metropolitan homosexual community in the time when being gay was still a criminal offence.

Journey to the final frontier of sci-fi zombie horror! Jim Pike was the world’s biggest Star Trek fan—until two tours of duty in Afghanistan destroyed his faith in the human race. Now he sleepwalks through life as the assistant manager of a small hotel in downtown Houston. But when...

When Ruby was a child growing up in Miami, she saw a boy from her school struggling against the ocean waves while his parents were preoccupied. Instead of helping him, Ruby dove under the water and held his ankle down until he drowned. She waited to feel guilty for it, but she never did. And, as Ruby will argue in her senior thesis while studying psychology at Yale, guilt is sort of like eating ice cream while on a diet—if you're already feeling bad, why not eat the whole carton? And so, the bodies start to stack up. 

Here, in Lynne Truss' first novel, we meet Osborne Lonsdale, a down-at-heel journalist, mysteriously attractive to women, who writes a regular celebrity interview for Come into the Garden. This week his "Me and My Shed" column will be based on the charming garden outhouse owned by TV sitcom star Angela Farmer. Unbeknownst to Osborne, driving down to Devon to interview Angela in her country retreat, the sleepy magazine has been taken over by new management.