The Assholes are coming to get you, Barbara...
From Wonderland Award Winner Kevin L. Donihe, comes a hilarious tribute to Night of the Living Dead (1968).
A plague of assholes is infecting the countryside. Normal everyday people are transforming into jerks, snobs, dicks, and douchebags. And they all have only one purpose: to make your life a living hell. Today is the worst day of Barbara's life. The assholes are everywhere. They're picking fights, causing accidents, and even killing people. But she must remain calm. If you raise your temper to an asshole you'll become one of them. After losing her brother to the asshole onslaught, Barbara flees for her life. She finds safety in a desolate farmhouse with six other survivors. Cut off from the world and surrounded by a sea of assholes, they must figure out a way to last through the night. But more and more of those annoying bastards are gathering outside, preparing for the coming of something much worse...
This novella contains examples of the following Tropes:
- Ambiguously Human: The assholes all look human, even if they all look and behave like every Jerkass stereotype you could imagine, but they are virtually unkillable with the exception of their ass.
- Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Barbara has suffered from a Hair-Trigger Temper that has caused much grief in her life and uses various calming methods - smoking, pills, a life-sized dammit-doll and her favorite smoothie - to keep her from acting out her aggression on other people. Barbara surviving an apocalypse where people are literally trying to provoke her and being low on cigarettes, pills and witnessing your little brother being painfully transformed into one of them makes it harder and harder to keep her from becoming an asshole too.
- Death by Gluttony: Downplayed. Linda is killed when an asshole force-feeds her a hotdog when she turns it down, choking to death on it.
- Downer Ending: Right after believing that they have escaped, Todd accidentally gets turned into an asshole with a crowd of them having been hiding out of sight. Asshole!Todd calmly explains to her that assholes have taken over the Earth and have been capturing any non-assholes left unwilling to convert to be captured and used as slaves and fodder for the new world order. He offers her a chance to live on as a slave and she declines. The wave of assholes all surround her, she allows her anger to take hold and becomes an asshole.
- Elite Zombie: Asshole!Todd claims that some assholes are more advanced than others and are acting as leaders in the new world order. Since some of the assholes seen have been Master Race proponents and Adolf Hitler, this is likely just him being an asshole by acting superior.
- Geas: It is shown that assholes manifest when a non-asshole fights back when provoked by an asshole, so the best way not to turn into an asshole yourself is to be the Nice Guy and not act like an asshole. Unfortunately, the parameters of what it means to act like an asshole is so nebulous that the characters argue back and forth as to what actions constitute being an asshole, such as cases of self-defense or simply insulting them, makes enduring the asshole's relentless heckling equal parts a test of patience and a fight for survival.
- Hate Plague: Here, Assholeness is a contagious zombie-virus like epidemic where you are turned into an over the top caricature of a person out to make all non-assholes miserable. They all behave like low-functioning sociopaths, ranging from waiters who intentionally get your orders wrong to dumbass jocks catcalling you to full-on Leatherface-esq Serial Killers out to feed you your own eyeballs in the streets.
- Hate Sink: In a world where being an asshole is like a zombie-virus, no character in the book is more of an asshole (in the conventional sense) than Ellen. Everything she says or does is based around her own ego and an almost pathological contempt for the world around her. All she ever does is judge or insult Todd and Barbara and their decisions, preferring to hide out in the house's enormous grandfather clock. She mocks Barbara for accepting Todd's lint-covered sandwich after denying her any of the candy she had in her purse. Her relationship with her husband Harold is clearly abusive, with her calling him a child at several points, speaking for him and generally ordering him around like a repeat target of a high-school bully. The only redeeming quality she seems to have is that she cares for the well-being of her daughter and even then she keeps her under constant sedation because the Hate Plague had turned her into goddamn Adolf Hitler and created a massive risk in all of their survival by keeping an asshole with them in the house.
- Henpecked Husband: Harold is shown to be meek and rather cowardly and it is almost explicitly stated that it was caused (or at least exacerbated) by the cruelty of his wife Ellen.
- Hope Spot: When it seems like Barbara and Todd have discovered a way to ward off the assholes and have long since gotten away, Todd flips the bird and insults the assholes when he thinks they aren't around. Then an asshole pops out and calls him out, thus technically making Todd's act of innocent defiance him being an asshole to another asshole and turning him into an asshole.
- Kent Brockman News: Played for Horror as the television news station the survivors periodically check gradually falls to the assholes.
- Logical Weakness: Discussed. The only weak point the assholes all have is their assholes (anatomically speaking). A stab in the ass and they die instantly.
- The Power of Love: Todd and Barbara discover that genuine love and caring renders the assholes into a pacified state and manage to escape the house and the crowd of assholes surrounding it by making love. It is kept vague whether or not it was genuinely working or if the assholes were just toying with them.
- Rule of Symbolism: In the ending, Todd and Barbara have escaped from the assholes in the wilderness. Both are naked, having escaped by their love-making and are content now that they have a break from the assholes with a means of keeping them away. Right after Todd helps himself to an apple from a nearby tree, he flips the bird and shouts at the assholes, only for an asshole to appear and destroy their chances at living Happily Ever After.
- World of Jerkass: Invoked. Its a Zombie Apocalypse where instead of everyone becoming mindless, flesh-eating reanimated corpses, they become over-the-top stereotypes of every type of Jerkass - or "assholes" as they are collectively called - you can imagine. They act this way both out of a sadistic desire to provoke others and because forcing non-assholes to fight back is how they create more of their kind.
