Welcome to the Underworld's Worst Department.
Carl Percival was just another soul-crushed middle manager at a beige, soul-sucking corporate job?until a rogue stapler ended his earthly existence and sent him straight to the one place worse than the 9-to-5 grind: Hell. More specifically, Hell's Human Resources Department.
Now Carl's stuck navigating the infernal bureaucracy of the afterlife, where sentient filing cabinets groan with the weight of misplaced souls, demonic interns fuel themselves with brimstone espresso, and "Fun Fridays" involve competitive scorpion racing. Between onboarding the eternally damned and mediating HR disputes between archdemons over parking spaces, Carl must learn to survive office politics that make Earth's look like a daycare.
But when a soul-siphoning tech startup threatens to upend the balance between Heaven, Hell, and LinkedIn, Carl might be the only one capable?or desperate?enough to save the underworld's most dysfunctional department.
Reed Mallory's Human Resources from Hell is a razor-sharp, darkly hilarious satire for anyone who's ever suffered through a team-building seminar and wondered if damnation was just another meeting away.
Autorentext
Reed Mallory writes speculative satire for the spiritually exhausted, the algorithmically overexposed, and anyone who's ever tried to survive a team-building exercise without losing their soul. A lifelong student of bureaucracy?divine, corporate, and digital?Mallory brings a sharp wit and a love of the absurd to stories that blur the lines between the celestial and the cubicle, the viral and the eternal.
His debut novel, Cancel the Apocalypse, earned cult acclaim for its hilarious portrayal of divine mismanagement and a clerical error that nearly ended the world on the wrong day. His latest, Human Resources from Hell, takes readers deeper into the underworld's fluorescent-lit offices, where performance reviews are eternal and staplers have a thirst for blood.
Up next is The Algorithm Is Watching, a darkly comic tech thriller that asks what happens when your social media strategy becomes sentient?and wants to monetize your very existence.
When he's not writing, Mallory can be found arguing with his smart fridge, doomscrolling ironically, or drinking ethically-sourced coffee while plotting the next cosmic blunder.