Live, Laugh, Die by C.B. Shaw, dark comedy novel cover with a haunted porcelain doll

Live, Laugh, Die: A Dark Comedy Novel About a Fake Dying Wellness Guru

October 15, 2026 C.B. Shaw

THE C.B. SHAW LITERARY JOURNAL · DARK COMEDY & SATIRE

What if the best career move of your life was a lie about dying?

Dave Kessler spent sixteen years selling mattresses, and nothing ever happened to him. Then he found a lump under his left arm, told one lie in a bar at exactly the wrong moment, and became the face of a wellness empire built on a countdown that did not exist.

That is the setup for Live, Laugh, Die, a dark comedy novel by C.B. Shaw about faked illness, internet fame, and the lies we tell to be loved.

A satire of the wellness industry

Within weeks of Dave's lie, a slick marketer turns his fake countdown into a business: an online course, a luxury retreat, an app, a podcast, and a supplement that is mostly vitamin C in a matte black bottle. The book skewers wellness culture, guru branding, and the audience that hands over money for certainty.

It is funny because it is recognizable. Anyone who has scrolled past a stranger selling the secret to a better life will know these people.

An unreliable narrator you cannot quite abandon

Dave tells his own story, and he is a gifted liar who edits even his breakdowns. He is also a man who got a hand on his shoulder for the first time in years and could not give it back. The novel lives in the gap between what he says and what he knows.

Around him are a nurse who sees straight through him, a marketer who sees only upside, and a mother who sees everything. Four years in, the people he fooled are real, and so are the consequences.

Then the joke turns real

In the cruelest twist of Dave's life, a real diagnosis arrives, and nobody believes him. What follows is darker, tenderer, and harder to laugh at, in a good way. This is a story about grief, mortality, friendship, and the work of telling the truth when you have spent years being paid for the opposite.

Read the opening

Here is how the book begins, in a mattress store that plays the same song on a loop:

The pan flute was the worst of it.

DreamHaus, a mattress store on the wrong side of a strip mall, played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a synthesized pan flute, on a loop, twelve hours a day. Somebody at corporate had decided this. Nobody had ever been fired for it, which is the kind of thing you learn about a company when you work for it for sixteen years. I heard it in my sleep. I heard it in the shower. I once caught myself humming it at a funeral, and the widow gave me a look I still think about.

…

At eleven I got in the shower and found the lump. Under the left arm, high up, tucked where you never look. About the size of a grape, if a grape had wandered into the wrong room. … Nothing had ever happened to me. And a lump.

Chapter Three: The Guy With the Teeth

By noon it was four hundred thousand. By dinner it was a million and a half.

The phone got hot. It got so hot that I put it down on the counter at DreamHaus and it left a faint ring on the laminate. Mr. Dolan, the store manager, had a strict policy about phones on the floor, a policy he enforced by looking at people over the top of his glasses, and I broke it forty times that day. He caught me eleven of those times. Each time he opened his mouth, and each time he closed it again. By the fifth, I understood that Mr. Dolan had seen the video.

“Dave,” he said, finally, at the break room microwave. He was a thin, anxious man in a short-sleeved dress shirt who had run the store for nineteen years and had never once been surprised. “I just want you to know. If you need time. For. Appointments.”

“I’m fine, Mr. Dolan.”

“Of course you are.” He wouldn’t look at me. “Take whatever you need.”

It was the nicest thing he’d said to me in sixteen years, and he said it to a lie.

Kayla had seen it too. She stood next to me at the counter and looked at me the way people look at a dog that’s just done a trick. Wide-eyed. Tender. Slightly amazed that I could. She didn’t say anything about it. She just brought me a coffee I hadn’t asked for, with the little cardboard sleeve on it, and set it down very gently, as if it might hurt me.

I let her. God help me, I let all of them.

The comments were all the same shape. So sorry, Dave. Praying for you. How are you so calm? Sending love from Tulsa. Sending love from Glasgow. My mom had the same thing and you sound just like her. And then, buried underneath, like coins under a sofa cushion, the ones that mattered.

What do you do to stay present?

How do you get your head right?

Can you teach this?

Can you teach this.

I read that last one at the counter at 4 p.m., while Kayla explained the cooling-gel layer to a young couple who were never going to buy. I read it three times. I looked up at the showroom, at forty beds with their laminated cards, and a thought arrived. It was so clear and so cold and so stupid that I laughed out loud, and Kayla looked over.

People sell mattresses. People sell pillows. People sell a feeling about sleep. Why couldn’t you sell a feeling about dying?

I had one problem, which was that I didn’t know anything about it.

* * *

The café had exposed brick and a chalkboard menu that listed its coffees by altitude. A latte cost more than my lunch. Grant was already there when I walked in, standing, because he had apparently decided that sitting was for people who were not about to change your life.

He was forty. Broad, tan, in a navy sweater that fit him like it had been introduced to him personally. Teeth like a piano. A handshake like he was gripping a steering wheel and wanted to make sure it was still attached to the car. Ex-pharma sales, he told me, in the first ninety seconds, then two startups, both of which had “exited,” which, I would learn, is the word men use when they would prefer not to explain what happened.

“You’re dying,” he said, before I’d finished sitting down.

“Allegedly.”

“Don’t say allegedly. Allegedly is for cowards.” He sat. He folded his hands. He looked at me the way a man looks at a house he’s about to buy and has already decided to knock down the back wall. “You’re dying. That’s the asset.”

I should have gotten up. I want you to know I understood that, even then. Every instinct I had said that this man was a salesman, that I was the product, and that in about four minutes I would be handing him the keys.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m dying.”

“Good.” He leaned back. “Here’s what you’ve got. You’ve got a deadline. Everybody on earth is terrified of death and nobody has a plan. And you, my friend, are the only guy in the world who’s on the clock. That’s not a video. That’s a brand.”

“A brand of what?”

“Of knowing something they don’t. Of having less time, and therefore more truth. You ever see a rich guy lose it at a spa? He cries in the steam room. He’d pay anything to feel something real. You’re real. You’re dying.”

READER QUESTIONS · SPOILER FREE

Questions About Live, Laugh, Die

Is Live, Laugh, Die a true story?

No. Dave Kessler, the wellness empire, and everyone in it are fiction. The satire aims at real things, though: wellness gurus, viral fame, and the way a lie gets more convincing the more people want it to be true.

Is it a comedy or a drama?

Both, and it refuses to pick. The first half is savage satire. The second half gets quieter and more honest, and the jokes start costing the narrator something.

Who will enjoy this book?

Readers who like dark humor, unreliable narrators, morally gray protagonists, and redemption that has to be paid for. If you enjoy satire of internet culture and the wellness industry, start here.

How long is it?

The paperback runs 196 pages across 30 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, in a 6 x 9 inch trade size.

Does the book make light of cancer?

It makes light of the people who exploit it. The story is hard on the fake and respectful of the real, and its hospice nurse is the most grounded character in it.

Where can I buy it?

The paperback is available right here at Innocently Insane. An ebook edition is planned.