I’ve talked about Death by Cliché before. I really like the book, and I’m a beta-reader for the sequels.

It’s a game-genre dark comedy in which an RPG designer gets shot in the head and wakes up in the terribly-designed role playing game that is being run by the young man who pulled the trigger. And unlike the players at the table, when he takes damage it actually hurts.

He’s not helpless, however. He is a game designer, after all, and there are artifacts in this world that can only be fully understood by him. But first he must look past the flaming brassieres, and come to grips with the fact that he cannot see his character sheet.

This Thursday and Friday, September 8th and 9th¹ Death by Cliché will be on sale at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for just 99 cents.  Act now! Pounce! Buying this book is one of the 99 funniest things you can do with a dollar².

¹I’m not in charge of these things, but I think the sale begins at midnight Eastern time Thursday morning, and closes at midnight Eastern time Friday night. YMMV.

²If you had a dark, artisanal, bottled beer for every one of those pennies we would flee before you could start singing.

Matt Wallace shares my philosophy of humor: it is difficult to write, it is delightful to read, and it says important things that can’t be said any other way.

My first exposure to Matt’s work was this post about humorous SFF, and I was impressed. I liked the cut of his jib. On my flight to WorldCon I began reading his Sin du Jour series from the beginning, picking up Envy of Angels first. Here’s how that turned out:

I only made it 40% of the way through @MattFnWallace‘s ENVY OF ANGELS before giving up and buying both sequels.

— Howard Tayler (@howardtayler) August 17, 2016

I have now consumed all three of these serialized novellas. Not only do I have zero regrets, I have strong recommendations for you:

Envy of Angels, Lustlocked, and Pride’s Spell. You can pick up all three in ebook format for just $8.97

The Sin du Jour series is urban fantasy. Our heroes work for a catering company that has been licensed and contracted to provide fancy foodstuffs for demons, elves, and other magical creatures. This may sound funny, but the series is not situation comedy. The humor is woven cleanly through the stories, giving them a voice that nicely counters the mind-bending horror implicit in feeding certain things to certain other things.

The novellas move quickly, and link together in some very satisfying ways—satisfying, and funny, and delicious. With the help of his food-scientist fiancée Nikki, Matt was able to write about food in ways that made me hungry for things I couldn’t possibly afford, and in some cases couldn’t hope to digest.

If you want to pick up just Envy of Angels for starters, you can certainly do that. Maybe you’ll make it more than halfway through before you cave in and buy the next two books…