In short, sharp episodes, Please chronicles the life of a young man who drifts through a hallucinatory urban world filled with celebrity wannabes, addictive relationships and jobs that demand he become someone else. The only thing he cares about is finding his ex-wife, who seems to exist only in his memories now. This terse, savage debut fuses the quiet desperation of Raymond Carver with the absurdity and media-savvy irony of Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, Please has a compassionate ...

“Even angels have to make a living these days.”With this dry observance Peter Darbyshire introduces us to Cross, a man who has lived thousands of years, though he’d prefer not to have, and who is now hunting angels in a Barcelona filled with tourists, phone cameras and deep mystery. The Mona Lisa Sacrifice is a layered supernatural thriller, filled with history, magic and beloved characters. When an angel promises to deliver Judas, a forgotten god of a forgotten people, to...

**Long shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award for Short Fiction****Longlisted for the 2018 Sunburst Awards for the story "Casual Miracles"**In Has the World Ended Yet? we start with retired superheroes living in a soulless suburbia where everyone gets lost trying to get home. Then the angels start to fall from the sky. Is it Armageddon? And do we want the world to end or not?In a series of linked short stories Peter Darbyshire...

I'd Never Been Shot for Real Before takes readers through a post-9/11 world of sex clubs, bankruptcy cubicle farms and guns that definitely go off. This blackly comic short story will be a favourite for fans of Please, Peter Darbyshire's award-winning and critically acclaimed first book.

In these astonishing tales, Has the World Ended Yet? mashes up scheming ghosts, undead marketers, travelling deity salesmen, deadly supermodels, a troubled hit man and his sex doll partner, a truly Cold War, fallen heroes, old gods and avenging angels in a Twilight Zone–style collection that is as absurd as the real world yet profoundly human. We follow characters that are larger than life with tragic flaws that would put the Greek myths to shame, as they move thr...

The Witches never failed to extract a price somehow.When Cross stumbles drunkenly into a darkened Berlin theatre that is staging Hamlet, he does not expect to see Morgana le Fay on stage as Queen Gertrude or witness a real murder. But a deadly ghost is haunting the faerie queen’s plays and Morgana expects Cross to solve the mystery or risk his daughter, Amelia, becoming the next victim. With the fate of Amelia in the balance Cross tries to unravel a mystery that takes him ...

“You fool,” Sariel said. She gestured with a hand and the table between us slid to the side. “You ridiculous mortal fool. What did you do with the sphinx?” With these words Cross finds himself thrust into his most dangerous adventure yet, working with the double-crossing angel Sariel to stop Noah from ending his eternal suffering by ending the world. But this Noah has not saved any beings from the flood, he is God’s warden, and he is bound to hold all God’s mistakes captive on his ark for ...

Trotsky works for a neuromarketing company that scans his brain to test new products. Only his name isn’t really Trotsky -- that’s a code name he’s forced to use. And the products aren’t real -- they’re hologram prototypes. Trapped in an increasingly unreal world that leaves him haunted by hallucinations, Trotsky goes to accident scenes at night in search of something genuine. Instead, he finds Holiday, a wannabe actress who fakes accidents for insurance settlements but who dreams of stard...

I would take the whole world apart to find her.The immortal Cross is back in a wild new adventure – a desperate hunt to find the enigmatic Alice from the Wonderland tales. Alice has helped Cross save the world countless times over since she stepped out of the pages of her book, but now she is the one that needs rescue after vanishing during an apocalyptic battle. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys to mystical islands populated with murd...

Eighteen Weird Western short stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the three-time Hugo Award and four-time World Fantasy Award finalist online magazine that Locus online calls “a premiere venue for fantastic fiction, not just online but for all media.” Authors include Kenneth Mark Hoover, Peter Darbyshire, Mark Teppo, E. Catherine Tobler, Aurealis Award finalist and winner Ian McHugh, Shirley Jackson Award finalist Gemma Files (author of the Hexslinger novels), and Hugo Aw...

Issue #102 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies online magazine, featuring stories by Peter Darbyshire and Nathaniel Katz.

Eighteen steampunk short stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, the three-time Hugo Award and five-time World Fantasy Award finalist online magazine that Locus online calls “a premiere venue for fantastic fiction, not just online but for all media.”Authors include Campbell Award finalist Aliette de Bodard, Margaret Ronald, Marissa Lingen, Tony Pi, Nebula Award Finalist Tom Crosshill, and WSFA Small Press Award Finalist Yoon Ha Lee, and more.Their stories take reader...