Sign-In
Cart
The Laughter from the Dark
Paperback
Publisher Price: $14.99
Publisher: Daniel R Hersch
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Before the world knew war, before civilizations rose and fell, before humanity recorded its first history, something ancient and terrible was already laughing.
The Laughter from the Dark is narrated by Death himself and the six other Absolutes who witness the unfolding of all things: Change, Time, Life, Will, Destiny, and Providence. Together, they bear witness to the darkest chapters of human history, chapters never written down, because those who survived were too afraid to remember.
The First Son
The first murderer, history's original exile, kills his brother out of envy and earns a life of wandering. In the wilderness he meets Lamashtu, a healer who poisoned the children of those who mocked her grief. Together they are perfectly, terribly matched. He builds her a city. He does not realize what he has built until it is far too late.
The City That Should Not Have Survived
Generations pass. The city grows in cruelty and forbidden knowledge. Its people enter arrangements with fallen angels, birth giants, build machines that weaponize fear, and carve temples beneath the earth for rituals too dark to name. When a prophet arrives warning of coming judgment, they do not repent. They prepare. When the floodwaters rise, the Laughing People do not drown.
They vanish.
The Dark Expanse
They emerge in a lightless realm between dimensions where perpetual sound drills into the mind and corrupts the soul. Over centuries, their skin fades to ash, their eyes burn yellow, their smiles stretch past the natural lines of their faces. Their laughter becomes something that splinters courage and unravels the minds of all who hear it.
They are no longer the Laughing People.
They are the Ones Who Laugh.
The Return
When they tear their way back into the world, civilizations fall overnight. It falls to one man to do what no one else will attempt. Gilgamesh, prince of Uruk, goes into the mountains alone to seek an alliance with the creatures his people fear most. What he finds beneath the ice is only the beginning, and what comes through the mountain from another world entirely will change everything.
What follows are battles that became legends. Legends that became myths. Myths that humanity eventually dismissed as stories.
They were not stories.
Defeated, yes. Destroyed? Never. When you hear laughter in the dark, remember why we stand together.
The Court has forgotten. So has humanity.
They are still out there. And they are nowhere near finished.
The Laughter from the Dark is the prequel to A Light in the Darkness and The Witch-Bane, and the cosmological foundation of the entire Death Keeper Chronicles saga.
Also from
Hersch, Daniel R.
The Death Keeper Chronicles: A Light in the Darkness: A Light in the Darkness
Hersch, Daniel R.
Paperback
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback