John Dies at the End Hardcover – September 29, 2009

I wrote a review of this book shortly after it came out. It was up for a while, and then Amazon, in their infinite widsom, removed it.

I swear I am not David Wong's mother or significant other. He has not paid me for this review. There were no sexual favors exchanged. PINKIE SWEAR.

This book. Oh, my. This book. It was like a shot of Kahlua you didn't expect in your coffee.

No, that's not quite right. It was like the coffee you didn't expect in your chicken fricasee.

Okay, I suck at metaphors.

This book was AMAZING with capitals and hip-thrusts. Is it funny? Yes. YES. Is it scary? YAAAASSS. Is it everything you wanted in a horror novel that you didn't know you wanted? *random symbols because your mind cannot process the intensity of this yes*

Read this. If you're sorry, welp, sorry. But you won't be. I know these things.

This was quite possibly the weirdest, most surreal book I've ever read. The entire book reminded me of this Widespread Panic lyric, "You look around the room you find the pant is peeling, your reflective skin is falling off your bones." Like a good Stephen King novel even my dreams were infected. Just this morning I woke in a pool of sweat as a giant oozing acid monster was swallowing my head and melting me into a big blue vat. I was never happier to be awoken by the cash register sound my eBay app makes as I make yet another sell.

Have you read articles on cracked.com. I'm guessing if you're thinking of reading this book you've probably been on the site, but I'll explain anyway. Cracked is a comedy website known for it's raunchy humor and deconstructive take on modern pop-culture. 'John Dies at the End' was written by one of the site's writer's, and concentrates everything to love about the site into his book.

In the book David and his friend John are roped into a series of horrifying events around town, as people die or go missing in gruesome ways. The events are traced back to a drug called soy sauce, sold to the citzens of Undisclosed by Robert Marley. From there, the plot unfolds not unlike an HP Lovecraft novel, with dark cosmic powers unleashing misery and dick jokes on the world.

The best thing about the book is the humor. John and David are fun people, and Wong can certainly write well. Most of the jokes are admittedly crude toilet humor, but if that's your style of humor, you can't do much better. The horror is also well done, capturing the hopelessness and shock of the characters well.

The books only real problem is how it was released. This book was released piecemeal online, and it shows, with the narrative getting more and more lost as the book goes on. This makes the end result very confusing and makes a decent chunk of the book seem meandering in retrospect. Still, it's a fun novel, one I would recommend to anyone of college age.

While the author admittedly tells us, the reader, that this was a book he wrote for himself never expecting it to claim any notoriety, I'm amazed at what people sometimes consider worth reading or turning into a movie (which I haven't seen yet). This book had some really good parts, some interesting, some boring, and more than it's share of WTF, and not in a good way. I guess at least if it ever comes up in conversation I can say, "Oh, I read that", but to be completely honest I would like some "soy sauce" so I could go back in time and spend that time reading another book.

It's the damndest thing.. For some reason, for these last few weeks, it's like the world is filled with grotesque monsters. But not everyone sees it. Others tell me they see happy faces. But I've been seeing the smile of crocodiles. With a voracious, world eating hunger that can never be sated until all living things are torn apart and digested in the..

Oh yeah, and there's also dick jokes in this. If I ever outgrow a good dick joke, you should just shoot me.

I had already seen the movie a while ago, but I got the book because so many reviewers were saying how much the movie got wrong. I completely disagree. The movie was one of the best things I saw in years; easily 5 stars imo. The film told a lot of things out of sequence, and some of the things the characters did was jumbled around, but I was amazed at the level of detail in the movie and a huge amound of dialog was repeated verbatim. *small spoilers that I don't think will actually ruin anything for you*.. I'm very glad the wig monsters weren't included or all the Bible/holy water stuff. I think adding the shadow people would have made the movie too convoluted. As would the Pi symbol stuff. After reading some of the book reviews, I thought maybe I had completely misunderstood the movie, but I believe I understood it just fine. The main thing though that I thought the movie didn't really capture was John's personality. From the movie, I thought of him as.. idk, perhaps a bit like Dr. Venkman (bill murray) from Ghostbusters. But in reality he was supposed to be kind of a half maniac half zen smartass who is sort of a genius and you can fully understand why the book has his name in the title.

Okay, so here's why I gave the book a lower rating than I'd give the movie.. And I'd also like to stress that I saw the movie first and so I wasn't as blown away by the book's creativity because I knew a lot of what would happen. First, I don't think the book was especially well written. It's a first person narrative, told from the pov of Dave. I got so sick of seeing the word "I" at the beginning of every sentence! I think David Wong the writer (not his real name) wanted to create the illusion that the younger David Wong telling the story came off as an immature and unreliable narrator which is why parts of the book come off like it needed an editor in the worst possible way. For me, it's never a pleasant experience to read something that feels like it was written by a C student and I wish a different approach was taken. Secondly, I absolutely loved the immaturity of it, but it very often crossed the line into 11 year old's sense of humor. Third, and this one may be on me, but the time period was off. John and Dave work in a video store and listen to 80s heavy metal, yet every indication is that this is happening close to now. This may not be a flaw in the book because there's something that's said toward the end.. but I spent a lot of my time reading this feeling confused and I still kind of do.

One thing I really like is how they use The Unreliable Narrator because it's left to the audience whether we want to believe every word or not. It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that gave you much more useful information, but you couldn't trust it factually. I'm still glad I read the book because there is a sequel: This book is full of spiders.