Book excerpt: The Coffee Magnate and Other Tales?a richly disturbing, darkly comedic, and macabre collection?hits a new low as an insulting portrait of life?s slimy underbelly and humanity at its worst, guaranteed to offend the most insensitive readers. These 17 stories of senseless death, suicide, slaughter, and death-defiance, flanked by episodes of debacle, divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, prostitution, greed, malpractice, murder, mysticism, and madness, culminate in a hell of mankind?s creation, an apocalypse, and the end of so-called civilization.