Showing results for "The Rural" in Dark Humour

Farley stands out among his Iñupiat neighbors in the Alaska village he calls home, both white and enormous, like the hungry polar bears that wander its streets. Jovial and a little hapless, he works as an investigator for a North Slope oil company, passing the long Arctic winters drinking whiskey with the village’s preacher and playing in the weekly poker game hosted by its matriarch and mayor. When his young daughter visits from thousands of miles away in Portland—where she lives with her mother, who despises him—a shocking moment of violence leaves her dead and Farley injured.

Ray Welter, who was until recently a high-flying advertising executive in Chicago, has left the world of newspeak behind. He decamps to the isolated Scottish Isle of Jura in order to spend a few months in the cottage where George Orwell wrote most of his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray is miserable and quite prepared to make his troubles go away with the help of copious quantities of excellent scotch.

"Ageless" Hollywood diva Jessica Gray is finishing the last leg of her one-woman show in St. Louis, Missouri, and the nearby town of Chouteau Forest is dazzled. During the show, she humiliates three homeless women onstage, fires her entourage - not for the first time - and makes a bitter enemy of the town's powerful patriarch. After she collapses at an after-show party and is rushed to the hospital, she ignores the advice of her doctors and discharges herself in order to return to LA.

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.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, Trowbridge Vermont EMT Brighid Doran delivers the region’s ambulance to a three-alarm house fire. Afterward, she sits in a warm truck with her girlfriend Sam, a US Army officer fresh from the battlefields of Iraq, as they watch a local volunteer firefighter battle the blast in subzero weather.

Boston-born first-responder Alex Flynn gets called into the principal’s office in this short story set in rural Vermont, where poor roads and under-funded public services form a comfortable and familiar background. Explore the hidden links and community found in an ordinary New England town when local first responders might or might not have to engage with an active school shooter. Trowbridge Dispatch is part of the Trowbridge, Vermont series of novels and stories, wherein I.M. Aiken draws on her roots in public safety to narrate tales of the everyday heroes that every community depends on.