John Dies at the End (Paperback)

by David Wong (Author)
Key Phrases: one ball, weather guy, Big Jim, Soy Sauce, Las Vegas (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
David Wong [has] managed to write that rarest of things--a genuinely scary story. -- David Wellington, author of Monster Island

Product Description
The word-of-mouth phenomenon read online by over 50,000 readers is now available in print!

Telling the story now, I'm tempted to say something like, "Who would have thought that John would help bring about the end of the world?" I won't say that, though, because most of us who grew up with John thought he would help end the world somehow.

It's a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can't.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Permuted Press (August 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978970764
• ISBN-13: 978-0978970765
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #307,640 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect comedy meets perfect horror, September 17, 2007

By	Lee Gaiteri (Syracuse, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you blended the works of Lovecraft and Kevin Smith, then mixed that with about three parts pure awesome and left it to grow behind your fridge, you might get a vague sense of the genre David Wong bullseyes with this book. It's funny enough to appeal even to non-fans of the horror genre, yet scary enough to stay with you for a long time. It's the sort of book that can raise specters so horrible you tell yourself you couldn't ever have imagined them, yet it keeps your faith in humanity alive with the way Dave and John (especially John) seem to casually flip off a barrage of unspeakable evil. In a book that opens fighting meat-ghosts with '80s glam rock, you know you're in for something special.

It's all about the soy sauce, a mysterious substance that "chooses" its takers and imbues them permanently with an ability to pick up on the doings of other dimensions. In the short term it can provide an insight into spacetime so profound as to tell them just where to go to get a large sum of cash, or how a chicken lived its life before becoming an entree. It's also the key to an invasion from the beyond, but it doesn't end there. The evil wants in, at any cost, and it's not above even cheap schoolyard-style bullying to get its way. Luckily, Dave and John know just how to handle that.

The bizarre thing about this book is that it is literally laugh-out-loud funny, but at the same time it's hide-under-the-bed scary. It is neither horror with comic relief nor comedy with a horror theme. It's both pure comedy and pure horror, two books coexisting in one, which should be impossible but somehow David Wong can pull it off. It kept me hooked right up to the end, for more reasons than just to find out how John dies.

55 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Squancho, September 5, 2007

By	J. Calandra - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book by up and coming horror/comedy writer David Wong is one of the scariest novels I've read in a very long time. It's not the sort of scary where you're actually scared while reading. Mostly you will be amused, entertained, and probably a bit surprised at parts. The real terror comes once you try to sleep the next night, and the night after, and the night after that and so forth. I haven't slept a full night in the years since I first read John Dies At The End and this is the reason the state took away my driver's license.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible!!!, September 21, 2007

By	Danielle Justice-puett "JDatE Fan" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I knew I was going to buy this book before I was finished reading the prologue online. Before I was halfway through it, I had thought to myself, "I am going to buy this, even though I'm already reading it, simply to support David for being an outstanding author!" He took down his website when I was 2 chapters short of finishing it. (I have a 2 year old who eats books, so I was overjoyed to find a great book online) I immediately looked for the link to order it and had it overnighted. This book had me giggling on page one, freaked out by chapter one, and seeing things out of the corner of my eye, that did not exist, even three days after laying it down. This story will stay with me as long as I live. I even went to the extent to cut/paste each chapter and email it to my husband, over in Iraq, so he could read it too.