Joey Comeau’s follow up to Overqualified is One Bloody Thing After Another. The previous was the tale of a man’s loss of his brother, as told through cover letters, while One Bloody Thing After Another is a comedy-horror.
Jackie is a teenager in high school. Her mother died, and she’s been haunted since. She wants to ask out her best friend Ann. Ann’s mother is transforming into a beast, and has been refusing food, unless it was still living. Then there’s Charlie, who along with his dog Mitchie are being haunted by a headless ghost who seems to leave a lot of blood in her wake.
While it’s a horror novel, it’s not scary, or maybe I’m just a cold-blooded asshole. It’s funny, and I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be funny. If you’re a fan of Comeau’s and Emily Horne’s webcomic A Softer World, you’d know what type of humour to expect.
Comeau had me laughing out loud, in public, only three pages into the book, in the prologue. Ann’s mother had just left an interview.
“That did not go well,” Jeff says.
He can joke because none of the blood landed on him.
The book is short, at only 165 pages, and its filled with over 50 short chapters. I breezed through the book in a matter of hours, and didn’t want to put it down. All the characters have an interesting history, getting the reader directly connected immediately, and the humour will surprise you.