Under the Sea

Author: Mark Leidner

Publisher: Tyrant Books (2018)

In the gripping opener "Bad-Asses," a naive drug dealer's stash is stolen, leading her to unleash her inner bad-ass as she tries to recover it. In the bizarre and hilarious "21 Extremely Bad Breakups," each breakup is more absurd than the last: lovers get side-swiped by speeding busses, play paper-rock-scissors with each others lives, cause an asteroid to destroy the planet, and more. In "Under the Sea," a woman with one day to live has an affair with a loser she picks up at a video game arcade. In the unbelievably epic "Avern-Y6," a despondent insect gets shitfaced at the brink of a colony-wide civil war, only to learn he has a role to play in history after all. A social outcast going off on some teens in a bougie café, a depressed man in a physical fight with an interdimensional void, a middle-school student waxing memoiristic about heartbreak, a self-defeating academic sending a career-ending email—indelible characters are the heart of every story's wild ride in Under the Sea.