Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World

384 pages

English language

Published 2025 by Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-81840-4

The apocalypse will be an HR nightmare.

Colin Harris is your typical twenty-something stuck in a dead-end job. He joined Dark Enterprises, humanity’s oldest and most dangerous corporation, for the usual reasons: immeasurable power, staggering wealth, maybe the chance to rule the world someday. After spending two years as a lowly data analyst in Human Resources, however, Colin now faces early retirement. He has one week to turn things around or he’s going to be terminated. Like, terminated.

Desperate, he makes a deal with a mysterious entity and secures the promotion he’s always wanted. The catch? He’s loosed a ravenous supernatural monster on an unsuspecting world, which probably isn’t great. Worse, he’s met an incredibly hot guy who just might be the love of his life, and that makes looming global annihilation pretty inconvenient.

With the clock ticking down to the end of everything, Colin sets out …

The apocalypse will be an HR nightmare.

Colin Harris is your typical twenty-something stuck in a dead-end job. He joined Dark Enterprises, humanity’s oldest and most dangerous corporation, for the usual reasons: immeasurable power, staggering wealth, maybe the chance to rule the world someday. After spending two years as a lowly data analyst in Human Resources, however, Colin now faces early retirement. He has one week to turn things around or he’s going to be terminated. Like, terminated.

Desperate, he makes a deal with a mysterious entity and secures the promotion he’s always wanted. The catch? He’s loosed a ravenous supernatural monster on an unsuspecting world, which probably isn’t great. Worse, he’s met an incredibly hot guy who just might be the love of his life, and that makes looming global annihilation pretty inconvenient.

With the clock ticking down to the end of everything, Colin sets out to save the world. It’s the ultimate power move. Along the way he’ll have to impress his new boss, outwit a few homicidal coworkers, keep his job a secret from his best friend, and survive a pair of lurking assassins. It won’t be easy, but such is life in Dark Enterprises—if the deadlines don’t kill you, something else probably will.

-- from markwaddellbooks.com/colin-gets-promoted-and-dooms-the-world/

1 edition

el dang reviewed Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell

A fun book that knows exactly how ridiculous it's being and manages to cram some serious parts in at the same time

5 stars

Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.

The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.

Minor criticisms: …

Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.

The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.

Minor criticisms: even the other characters who get significant time don't feel fully fleshed out, probably because we only see them through Colin's eyes. And there are times, particularly towards the end, when the fantasy elements can get a bit USS Make Shit Up. Which would be very frustrating if the point of the book were Serious Fantasy Worldbuilding, but it's so not that.