The angels have returned. Superheroes are real. Hold my beer.

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 through a broken, corrupted Instagram version of our lives.

Is it Armageddon? Is it something else? The end of the world is not what we expect, what any of Darbyshire’s characters expect, and it may not really be happening at all. But should it?

“An off-kilter, phantasmagorical treat. Darbyshire delights in mashing pop-culture genres together, exposing profound truths beneath classic tropes in ways at once hilarious, weird, and heart-breaking. Any collection that has H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary god Cthulhu working for a temp agency gets an automatic pass from me.”

“Darbyshire delights in mashing pop-culture genres together, exposing profound truths beneath classic tropes in ways at once hilarious, weird, and heart-breaking.”

“Each of these pieces is bleak in tone and absurd on its face, but Darbyshire imbues them with unexpected emotional complexity and moral ambiguity.”

“But in the tradition of writers such as Neil Gaiman, Darbyshire knows how to keep the action moving so you can comfortably bounce around the story with no particular place to go, frequently laughing out loud at the descriptions. The end, it turns out, is meaningless.”

“In Peter Darbyshire’s book of short stories, the world has definitely ended or is ending, although it has ended differently and on a variety of scales per story. Sometimes it’s catastrophic for everybody, sometimes just a couple of city blocks frozen in time. He also places a couple of the stories right in hell and told from the demon’s perspective, which, as you can guess, is a little bit skewed. In Darbyshire’s fiction, the world and the people in it are somehow us and familiar and somehow not. Superheroes have to retire, angels are probably not that great, and everybody is fully aware that marketing is evil. And models are too. They still don’t eat anything. Except other people.”