FOREWORD
Over the last three years my team and I have done our best to showcase a wide variety of stories and cover as many different types and styles of humor as possible. This year, we’re doing something different: there is an overall theme to the book, and that theme is dark humor.
What’s dark humor? I’m open to a rather wide interpretation of the theme. It can be black comedy, touching on subjects that are normally taboo or painful to talk about. It can also be biting satire, or morbid irony. When I presented the idea to our authors, I told them that I still wanted each story to be humorous first, with varying shades of darkness in the mix. I gave them plenty of freedom to do what they will with the prompt.
The resulting collection is almost as varied as the previous volumes, even though—and I hope you will agree upon reading it—the dark humor theme is consistently present. Among the twenty-three stories collected within there are horror tales with a touch of humor, such as “The Monkey Treatment” by George R. R. Martin and “Armed for You” by Anaea Lay. There are lighthearted yarns by Esther Friesner and Piers Anthony that inject just enough darkness to hide the banana peel. And there’s everything in between.
Inside this volume you will also find time-traveling ghosts, Faustian bargains gone awry, talking hamsters, flawed supervillains…I could go on, but really, the stories themselves are more fun than anything I can say about them here. So I will step aside, and let you enjoy them.
Happy reading!