Greetings from Darbyshire, a town in which wacky and offensive characters struggle mightily against the nature of modernity. “Welcome to the Jungle" is the first installment in the Darbyshire series, and introduces a handful of the fictitious municipality’s inhabitants in ferociously punchy short stories. Darbyshire is a series of meme-grade, literary hail Marys. Like a funhouse mirror, the tales warp the depressing reality of the modern world into something so exceptionally gay, even stoic loggers and dry seamen will drop their faggots and forget about their crabs as they attempt to retard their titillation. The derisive and hyperbolic storytelling perfectly encapsulates the nonsense of popular culture, and no matter which story you find most engaging, this much is true: there are only two fundamental reactions one can have to the Darbyshire series. Some will enjoy the ride, while others angrily blog on the finer points of life not being fair. In the city of Darbyshire, the anthropomorphized animals of Maverick Alexander’s imagination routinely find themselves in catastrophically unfortunate situations, however, despite the fantastical storytelling, most everything rhymes with reality. This zeitgeist-capturing chronicling is littered with empirically important parables of time travelers impressing Chinese tourists, heavyset train-wrecks filing workplace sexual harassment claims, volunteer crossing guards thwarting small-scale human trafficking operations, and terminally depressed narcissists swiping on dating apps—It’s a melodious symphony of nonstop nonsense, nothing short of a ceaseless crescendo. I just lost the game. | Darbyshire by Maverick Alexander, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters