John Dies at the End is an incredibly original, fun, and at times genuinely horrific story about a couple of losers being forced to battle meat monsters, Shadow Men, the inter-dimensional terror Korrok, and their own ineptitude. This Book is Full of Spiders takes this concept and runs with it for about 100 pages, before dropping it for a more serious tone.
The book picks up an unspecified amount of time after JDatE. Dave and John are still wandering without direction, living in squalor, and occasionally dealing with horrors. New dangers emerge as parasitic spiders take over humans and change them into murderous monstrosities. Dave and John jump into action, handling the situation as they have so many others; with humor, improvised weapons, and fire. Unlike previous situations, this makes the situation exponentially worse, and they quickly realize it.
At this point things take a sharp turn. The jokes trickle off, the main characters get splintered into their own separate paths, and we learn something very important; Dave and John are a team for a reason. Neither works especially well without the other, and all of the stories lack the same spark that had been present in the first 100 pages, or the entirety of the first book.
This setup is however necessary for what end up being the overriding themes of the book. The characters are all given a chance to grow up to varying degrees, and frankly Dave and John completely enable each other, so it never would have happened without them being separated. To be honest, I did not especially want to see them grow. I wanted to see the hilarity that always came from them enabling each other, and handling serious, world ending situations with the mentality of grown children.
There are still grown children in the story, but they are no longer shown in a favorable, amusing light. Every time characters acted on their own, just branching out and acting immaturely, there were negative consequences. VERY negative consequences. The authority figures seem to know what they are doing, and the rogue individuals acting of their own accord are messing it up. Again, that is a point the book wants to get across, it just runs extremely counter to the first book. Signs of a maturing author, perhaps, but I found that it also led to a less engaging narrative.
The other huge theme is the idea that we are all the heroes of our own stories, and that seeing the same events from different angles completely changes the story. Amy's story followed a bunch of hipster college students who are excited at the idea of getting famous during the zombie apocalypse. Dave's story shows how paranoia turns us against each other, and how humanity's relationship with itself is the real danger. John's story is about being the person who always got things fixed needing to deal with no longer being "the guy," and everything he knew seems to be wrong. By the end even the "villains" motives are explained in a way that allows the reader to realize that nobody in the story was evil, they were just all doing what they thought was right.
You may have noticed how little comedy there seems to be in those stories, and how even the horror seems tangential to the personal arcs, and that would be because that is how the book is set up. For better or worse, this is a sequel that goes in a very different direction than the first book. It is more interested in human nature and growing up than it is in monsters and jokes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it is unfair of fans to expect artists to always deliver more of the same. Artists change and grow, and their art is bound to reflect that.
As a fan of JDatE, I wanted more of the same. I wanted more jokes, more monsters, more zany action. And I am disappointed that I did not get it. What is there is interesting, different, and still worth a read, but it is not JDatE2. That is not what this book is, and hopefully if you do not expect that you can enjoy it more than I did.
