We All Died in 2020 and This Is Hell: A Funny Book About Hell
If you are looking for a funny book about hell, we have to tell you something first. You are probably already in it.
Dale Hoover found out on a Tuesday at 12:14 in the afternoon, standing in the Big Buck’s Burgers in Tick Ridge, Kentucky, trying to buy a chicken sandwich. The sandwich was $23.71. The ordering kiosk wanted a thirty percent tip for letting him type in his own order. The only employee in the building was sitting on an upside-down pickle bucket in the back, yelling that customers give him anxiety.
So Dale sat in his truck and said, very quietly, “This is hell.” And the drive-thru speaker said, “Correct.”
A Funny Book About Hell That Starts at a Fast Food Kiosk
Here is what happened. On March 14, 2020, at 11:52 p.m., everybody on Earth died at the same time. Heaven had picked that exact night to switch its intake system over to a brand new kiosk, and when eight billion souls hit it at once, it said ERROR 4. Every single one of them got routed downstairs.
Hell did not have the room. So it built a copy of Earth, put everybody back where they had been standing, and told them all to stay home for two weeks while it fixed the seams. It forgot to render toilet paper. People noticed. Then it handed the whole thing to the Department of Modern Suffering with one instruction: make it worse, a little at a time, so they don’t notice.
Modern Hell is not fire. Fire got retired in 1974. Hell is an office park with beige carpet, a Keurig that only makes decaf, and a tired demon middle manager named Gary who is about to lose his job, because the humans are doing it better than Hell ever could.
Gary gets a deadline. Break the last decent man on Earth by the end of the quarter, or get turned into a self-order kiosk. Forever. The last decent man on Earth is Dale.
A Satire of Cancel Culture, Influencers, and Everything Since 2020
What follows is Hell throwing all of modern life at a man who holds doors. His wife leaves him on the advice of a podcast called Unbothered Queen Energy. His nephew wants two thousand dollars to join an alpha male academy run by a guy in a rented Lamborghini. Dale returns a lost wallet in a Dollar General parking lot, goes viral as Karen Dale, and fourteen million strangers decide what kind of man he is.
The church up on the hill turns into a vape lounge selling prayer subscriptions. The man who stole the catalytic converter off the Methodist church van gets elected mayor on memes. The hometown heroes are a drunk linebacker, a fugitive rapper who burned down a restaurant over a biscuit wait, and an influencer famous for pranking funerals. Every time Dale tries to do the right thing, somebody has a phone up, and he gets filmed, fired, arrested, or reported.
Then somebody offers him a quarter of a million dollars to become the villain everybody seems to want.
It is a satire that hits nearly everybody. Two podcasts with opposite politics hate Dale for opposite reasons, then endorse the same criminal for opposite reasons, and it turns out they have the same energy drink sponsor. Nobody in Tick Ridge is safe, and nobody on your phone is either.
Who Will Love This Dark Comedy About the Afterlife
If you have ever stood at a machine that asked you for a tip, wondered who exactly you were tipping, and felt a little bit dead inside, this book is for you. If you finished The Good Place and wanted something with more cussing and a coonhound, start here. If you like dark humor, afterlife comedies, and small-town Kentucky chaos with the kind of heart that sneaks up on you somewhere around a corner piece of cornbread, you are home.
One honest note, since a lot of our books run hot: this one has no sex in it. There is some cussing, a Hummer driven straight through a ramp festival, and a coonhound named Waylon who is fine. It is unhinged, it is funny, and underneath all of it, it is about the hardest thing left in the world, which is doing one decent thing when nobody is watching.
Want more? Browse all of our weird pulp fiction and unhinged comedy books, or check out our list of dark humor books worth your time.
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