Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Dark Humour

Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her 'missing' boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit. 

Every weekend, in basements and car parks across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on the world.

Steffie spends her days working in a dry-cleaner’s, trying to scrub the world clean one garment at a time. But no matter how spotless the clothes, she can’t rid herself of the guilt and grime she feels inside. Haunted by what happened to her sister when they were children, large fragments of which she can’t fully remember, Steffie is stuck in a loop of self-destruction, defiance, and shame.

Patrick Bateman is 26 and works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming, and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. And he is taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare...

John Self is addicted to life. Porn freak and jetsetter, a aficionado of wealth and women, Self is the shameless heir to a fast-food culture where money beats out an insistent invitation to futile self-gratification. Out in New York, mingling with the mighty, making a fortune but spending more, Self is embroiled in the corruption, the brutality and the obscenity of the money conspiracy.

Set in London and the Scottish Highlands, The Driving Seat is a literary domestic thriller, full of blistering black humour, compulsive plotting and an electrifying final showdown.

Enid is many things: lesbian, serial dater, deaf in one ear, space obsessive, true crime fanatic. When she's not listening to grizzly murder podcasts, she's managing her crippling phobia of bald people and trying hard not to think about her mortifying teenage years—which is hard, when she's lost the password to her old YouTube account and the (many) vlogs that her teen self once uploaded. She's worried about herself, her depressive mother, and what the deal is with gender reveal parties.

He became a best-selling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was lost in a haze of booze, drugs and vilification. Then he was given a second chance. This is the life of Bret Easton Ellis, the author and subject of this remarkable novel. Confounding one expectation after another, Lunar Park is equally hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking. It’s the most original novel of an extraordinary career - and best of all: it all happened, every word is true. 

Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists....

It’s the height of the Palm Beach charity ball season: for every disease or cause, there’s a reason for the local luminaries to eat (minimally), drink (maximally) and be seen. But when a prominent high-society dowager suddenly vanishes during a swanky gala and is later found dead in a concrete grave, panic and chaos erupt. Kiki Pew was notable not just for her wealth and her jewels - she was an ardent fan of the winter White House resident just down the road and a founding member of the Potussies, a group of women dedicated to supporting their president.

Filled with relentless drinking in seamy bars and glamorous nightclubs, wild, drug-fuelled parties, and dispassionate sexual encounters, Less than Zero - narrated by Clay, an 18-year-old student returning home to Los Angeles for Christmas - is a fierce coming-of-age story, justifiably celebrated for its unflinching depiction of hedonistic youth, its brutal portrayal of the inexorable consequences of such moral depravity and its author’s refusal to condone or chastise such behaviour.

Jane Peters is an adrift 20-something by day, and a world-weary agony aunt by night. But when an office party goes too far, Jane dissolves into the high-stakes world of being the Other Woman: a role she has the right advice for, but not the smarts to follow through on. What starts out as a drunken mistake quickly unravels as Jane discovers that sex and power go hand in hand and that it's hard to keep your head when you've become someone else's dirty little secret. And soon, her friendships, her sanity and even her life are put into jeopardy.

It's September in Brighton, and the city is playing host to weeks of endless rain and lashings of villainy. A trusted member of a local gang has disappeared part way through planning a huge heist, a violent criminal obsessed with boiling the heads of policemen has escaped Broadmoor and is rumoured to be headed towards the city, while at Gosling's department store, an American researcher has been found dead in the music section.

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.

Yeah, yeah, the usual. A crime. A corpse. A killer. Heard it. Except this stiff happens to be a Ponsonby, scion of a venerable Edinburgh medical clan, and the manner of his death speaks of unspeakable things. Why is the body displayed like a slice of beef? How come his hands are digitally challenged? And if it's not the corpse, what is that awful smell?

Tucked away in the English countryside, the run-down marina at Vixens Mere hosts a ragtag community of houseboats whose lives are as tangled as their mooring ropes. Harry Jones’s death dredges up more than grief: a second body in the water, hidden love affairs, and old grudges. As the marina begins to reveal the truths of the past, its dwellers unify against investigators, vindictive exes, and anyone else who tries to break them.

Peyote Trip has a pretty good gig in the deals department on the fifth floor of Hell. Sure, none of the pens work, the coffee machine has been out of order for a century, and the only drink on offer is Jagermeister, but Pey has a plan—and all he needs is one last member of the Harrison family to sell their soul. When the Harrisons retreat to the family lake house for the summer, with their daughter Mickey's precocious new friend Ruth in tow, the opportunity Pey has waited a millennium for might finally be in his grasp.

Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mom, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend—attentive, attractive, liberal—and their chemistry feels genuine. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that's holding her back: Jolene is white. But Jolene really doesn't seem like one of the bad ones—she's done the reading, she goes to every protest, she even listens.

Meet Rachel Walsh. She's been living it up in New York City, spending her nights talking her way into glamorous parties before heading home in the early hours to her hot boyfriend Luke. But her sensible older sister showing up and sending her off to actual rehab wasn't quite part of her plan. She's only agreed to her incarceration because she's heard that rehab is wall-to-wall jacuzzis, gymnasiums and rock stars going cold turkey - plus it's about time she had a holiday.

You won't remember Mr Heming. He showed you round your comfortable home, before you took the plunge and bought it. But all these years later, he still has the key. That's absurd, you laugh. Of all the many hundreds of houses he has sold, why would he still have the key to mine? The answer to that is, he has the keys to them all.