Book links: Amazon, Goodreads

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Mark grew up on the cold, windswept Prairies of western Canada. Fleeing southward, he earned a Ph.D. in the history of science, medicine, and technology from the Johns Hopkins University and then enjoyed fifteen years of non-stop excitement as a humanities professor. Finally yearning for greener pastures, he persuaded his amazing husband to move to Vancouver Island, where they now live.

When not writing stories about murderous Canadians, he plays the viola in a local orchestra, walks his dogs along the seashore, and thinks up interesting ways to kill people.

Publisher: Ace (October 7, 2025) Page count: 384 Formats: audiobook, ebook, paperback

This one surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t? It is exactly what the title promises. A man gets a promotion and dooms the world. Well, mostly. Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World is a corporate satire mixed with horror and romance.

Colin is a nobody at Dark Enterprises, a company so evil it employs literal monsters, makes blood sacrifices part of their company culture, and where contract termination usually involves an actual execution. Colin is underperforming and fears his contract may be terminated soon. And so he makes a deal with a shadowy creature and gets promoted instead.

I liked how the author turned corporate cliches into horror and peppered the book with dry, self-aware humor that’s actually funny. Waddell writes with a restraint that makes the absurdity even funnier. There are no punchlines shouted for effect; the horror comes from how normal it all feels. Staff meetings continue while the city crumbles. We get corporate slogans twisted into demonic hierarchies, office memos written like commandments. There’s real craft behind the silliness, and an awareness of how horror and comedy can coexist without canceling each other out.

Now, Colin himself is not a good person. He’s weak, whiny, selfish, and only sporadically realizes he’s a cog in an infernal machine. That’s why the romance subplot feels absurd - Colin’s crush, Eric, sees “the good in him,” though the reader can’t. But fear not, it doesn’t go where you expect it to go - it’s a satire of the feel-good redemption arc, played absolutely straight.

There are a few slow patches, but the mix of horror, absurdity, and corporate satire kept me reading. The humor is sly, and the worldbuilding is bizarrely coherent for something that features office demons and motivational posters from Hell.

On the surface, Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World is a darkly comic urban horror-fantasy, filled with clever asides and grotesque details. But it’s also surprisingly insightful about the ways people rationalize their choices. It’s weird, funny, and well-written.