Happy Cruelty Day!: Daily Celebrations of Quiet Desperation

“Makes the pieces in The Onion look like bedtime stories . . . Powers delivers with 365 unforgettable and rather disturbing holidays.” —Contra-Costa Times

For everyone looking to find a little extra magic in a life with little to celebrate, Happy Cruelty Day! is here. Beginning on January 1, this book features 365 new holidays, each accompanied by a strange, dark and humorous short story explaining the day you woke up in and how to celebrate it. These 365 daily doses of delight, perversion, and nonsense include “Hire Someone Attractive to Pretend to Love You Day,” “Hang on to Your Wide-Eyed Innocence Day,” “Sit in Abject Terror Day,” and, of course, “Cruelty Day.”

Far more than just a humor book, Happy Cruelty Day! is like a daily instructional manual written by a psychopath. On one page, the book has you joining a community crime watch group in an effort to make friends (it won’t work). Flip the page, and you’ll find the details of your attempt to rescue your husband from a POW camp (you’ll fail). Flip it again, and Happy Cruelty Day! will have important insight into how best to befriend a runaway teen (offer her some soup).

These holidays celebrate everything from that pivotal point in your life when everything changes, to the day you’re not going to do anything but sit on the edge of your bed and get very drunk.

Raw, ridiculous, and laugh-out-loud funny, this is a sharp-edged satire on the subtleties, shallowness, and stupidity of daily life.

“My kind of book. Mean, but in a way that makes me smile. It’s like a pleasant nightmare.” —Fred Armisen

© 2024 St. Martin's Griffin (Ebook): 9781466854185

Release date

Ebook: 6 August 2024