The volcano selfie. The homemade flamethrower. The wedding that turned into a massacre. 303 painful endings across three ebooks — the dumbest deaths, the deadliest parties, and the famous careers that never quite happened. Binge it like the channel.
"Nobody wakes up planning to be a cautionary tale."
— The Painful ExplainerEverything behind the "Worst Deaths Ever" videos — and a whole lot that never made it to video.
Here's the problem with a video: I get maybe fifteen disasters in before you go to bed. The world has produced way more than fifteen. So I wrote the rest down — every terrible decision, every party that went sideways, every brush with fame that slipped away — and split it into three books.
The Book of Darwin is 101 real, documented deaths caused by astonishingly bad decisions. Swimming with crocodiles. Homemade fireworks. The volcano selfie. If you've ever yelled "WHY would you do that" at a screen, this one's for you.
101 Celebrations That Turned Deadly — the one with "Supposed to Be Fun" on the cover — covers weddings, festivals, coronations, and victory parties that ended in massacres and disasters, from ancient Rome to the 20th century.
101 Celebrities Who Didn't Make It is a different kind of painful: the turned-down roles, the near-misses, and the moments of fame that almost happened to real people — and then just… didn't.
Together they're The Painful Ending. Read one entry. Then another. Then look up and it's 2am.
1,629 pages across three ebooks. Here's a taste of each.
A catalog of real, documented deaths caused by astonishingly poor decisions — swimming with crocodiles, homemade fireworks, volcano selfies, and much, much worse.
A historical survey of weddings, festivals, coronations, and victory celebrations that turned into massacres, disasters, and tragedies, spanning ancient Rome to the 20th century.
A different kind of painful ending — the near-misses, turned-down roles, and missed moments of fame that almost happened to real public figures, but didn't.
(Mostly "I can't believe that actually happened.")
"The Book of Darwin is the funniest and most horrifying thing I've read all year. I kept reading entries out loud to my roommate until she made me stop."
"I watch every Worst Deaths video. 101 Celebrations That Turned Deadly is that, but 574 pages and zero ads. The Halifax chapter got me."
"Didn't expect the celebrities book to hit this hard. Some of these people were one phone call away from being household names."
I'm The Painful Explainer. I draw stick figures and walk you through the worst ways people have gone out — at sports games, amusement parks, concerts, caves, on the road, and everywhere else that was supposed to be a normal day.
Not the vague headline version. The full story: what they were thinking, the exact moment it went wrong, and what happened next. Because the scariest part of most disasters is how ordinary they looked five minutes before.
These three books are every ending I could fit, organized so you can binge them like a playlist.
Yes — every entry is about real people and real events, told in the same voice as the channel. Expect dark humor around the edges; the events themselves aren't made up. Where accounts of what happened differ, that's part of the story.
A video covers maybe fifteen disasters. This is 303 of them across 1,629 pages — including plenty that never made it into a video — organized by book so you can binge in order or jump straight to the one you're curious about.
Because I'd rather a lot of you read it than a few of you. Each ebook is $17 on its own, so the bundle gets you all three for less than the price of two.
All three — The Book of Darwin, 101 Celebrations That Turned Deadly, and 101 Celebrities Who Didn't Make It — delivered together in one download.
All three books are PDFs. They open on any phone, tablet, computer, or e-reader that reads PDF. You get the download link right after checkout.
About as graphic as the channel — it describes real accidents and deaths honestly, without going out of its way to be gory. If the videos don't bother you, the books won't either.
303 painful endings. 1,629 pages. $27 for the whole collection — instead of $17 each.
Get The Painful Ending Bundle — $51 $27