Stories of the Odd and Unusual: 9 Books About Terrible Decisions
There is a particular kind of story I keep coming back to. Not horror, not fantasy, nothing with a prophecy in it. Just an ordinary person, going about an ordinary week, who takes one small step sideways and ends up somewhere no reasonable person has ever been.
Nobody in these books is evil. Most of them are trying their best. That is the part I find funny, and it is the part that makes them worth reading rather than just worth describing at a party.
Here are nine of them, all mine, sorted roughly by how hard they are to explain to your mother.
Stories of the odd and unusual
My Anxiety Got a Promotion
The gentlest one on this list, and the one most people see themselves in. His anxiety does not get treated, managed or medicated. It gets promoted, and it is now his boss. If you have ever been quietly managed by your own worst thoughts while trying to look normal in a meeting, this one is going to feel less like comedy and more like a documentary. Read the summary.
The Internet Troll Hunter
He hunts trolls. The internet kind. Mostly. That word “mostly” is doing an enormous amount of work, and I am not going to take it out. A book about the sort of person who decides the comment section is a problem that can be solved in person. Read the summary.
My HOA President is a Vampire
A neighbourhood dispute that goes horribly wrong, in a community that turns out to be worth dying for. The joke underneath it is that almost nothing about the HOA president’s behaviour has to change once you learn he is a vampire. The bylaws were already like that. Read the summary.
My Neighbor’s Dead Wife Keeps Flirting With Me
She is dead. She is flirting. It is complicated. The whole book lives in the gap between those three sentences, and in the specific social horror of not knowing whether it would be ruder to respond or to ignore her. Read the summary.
Andy the Influencer Discovers His Micro Penis
Fame, followers, and one very small discovery. Andy has built an entire personality on being admired by strangers, which is a fragile structure to begin with, and this is the week it meets something he cannot filter, crop or caption his way out of. Read the summary.
I Married a Fluffer Girl
He answered a Craigslist ad for a hundred dollars. He left with a wife. Everything after that sentence is consequence management. It is the purest version of the thing I keep writing: one decision that seemed survivable at the time, followed by a life. Read the summary.
Ghosts of Dicks Past
Her exes come back. Literally. Every man who ever disappointed her, returning in person, in order, with opinions. A haunting where the terrifying part is having to be in the same room as your own history and make conversation. Read the summary.
She Stole My Lottery Tickets, Exposed My Search History and Knifed My Blow-Up Doll
Doug wins the lottery quietly. Crystal finds out. She takes the winning tickets, airs years of his internet searches to the entire trailer park, and puts a knife in Denise, who was inflatable and who had never once judged him. Then it gets worse, and then, slowly, it gets better in a way Doug does not see coming. Podcast fame is involved. So is internet infamy. It is the meanest setup I have written and it ends up being about what a person actually needs. The full story is here, or read the summary on Amazon.
Honey’s Happy Ending Hide-A-Way
Honey Belle Hargrove wanted to be a psychologist. Instead she runs a small and unconventional business in a crumbling Tennessee strip mall, wedged between Big Earl’s smoke shop and a lawyer who handles other unfortunate developments. Her clients include a bored husband covering up a lie about a tractor, an exhausted father who wants ten uninterrupted minutes, an executive who needs someone else to take control for once, a deacon carrying a Bible and a peach cobbler, and a lonely widower who arrives with a genuinely homicidal chicken. It is filthy and it is warm, and Honey turns out to be doing the job she trained for after all. The full story is here, or read the summary on Amazon.
Where to start
If you want to know whether you like how I write before you commit to anything strange, start with My Anxiety Got a Promotion. It is the least explicit and the most recognisable.
If you want the full unfiltered version, She Stole My Lottery Tickets. That is the house style at full strength.
If you want to laugh and then be slightly moved about it, Honey’s Happy Ending Hide-A-Way.
And if your neighbours are currently the problem in your life, you already know which one.
One honest note
These are books for adults. Several are explicit, most are vulgar, and the ones that are not are still not what anyone would call wholesome. The point of all of them is to be funny and to give you somewhere to go for a few hours that is not here. If that is what you are after, you are in the right place.
Want more? Weird books to read when you hate everyone brings other authors into it, books with crazy titles is the shallow end, or browse the full catalog.
