Trying to describe David Wong’s JOHN DIES AT THE END – a great title, that – is like trying to describe your dreams: One can’t do it properly. But I’ll give it a shot.
This absolutely bug-nuts insane novel from Permuted Press is like TENACIOUS D meets THE X-FILES, with best buds David and John investigating situations of exceeding weirdness. It helps that one of them has uncanny psychic abilities and that other is paranoid to the nth degree. The slapdash story finds them checking out a drug called soy sauce – it appears to have spiky hairs on it, be alive and induce intense hallucinations in its users, such as your car is full of spiders.
Weird, right? That’s only the tip of this acid-trip of a debut, which stuffs butchered R.E.M. lyrics, a character who prefers to be called Shitload, a bomb impacted into a mentally challenged dog’s colon and jabs at Fred Durst and Jennifer Lopez into its near-freeform narrative.
Wong has quite the sense of humor, which brims over every page. Seriously, barely a paragraph goes by without some kind of joke – absurd, profane, scatalogical, illogical or otherwise. While this keeps the book alive when the plot lags, its sheer relentlessness tends to wear you down.
My advice: Digest JOHN DIES in chapter-length chunks rather than all at once. After all, it began as an online serial anyway, and that origin shows. Tackled in installments, it can be like that crazy friend you like to hang out every now and then, but who leaves before he trips your intolerance switch. –Rod Lott
Related posts:
- The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction
- LOUIS’ SERIOUS ISSUES >> 10.13.06
- QUICKGASM >> 5.17.07
- WHAT ED READ >> 4.20.07
- QUICKGASM >> 8.23.07
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
FIRST!!!!1!!!1! of all, what’s a URI? The retarded cousin of the URL?
Anyway, second, it really is a great book. [plug]Written by the guy who made pointlesswasteoftime.com, a great site. [/plug]
I disagree about the best way to read it. I always read it in two chunks, the part until they get back from Las Vegas, and then the rest. I don’t have the self-control to stop reading sooner, but I can’t read the whole thing in one night.
URI – Uniform Resource Identifier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier
Well, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? *John Dies at the End* isn’t frightening because of scary monsters or creepy moments or things that jump out and kill you; those are only the distractions from the real problem: it’s frightening because of the idea that no matter how much effort you spend trying to do good, or stop evil, there will still be more to do, and one day you might not see it. In fact, you are not seeing it right now.
If you REALLY work at it, you’ll lose a little more slowly to the things you don’t perceive because you don’t have the capacity to view things on a scale that lends order to the absolute mess of daily individual life. So the theme of the story is that living the good life IS a relentless grind, broken at every opportunity with the axe of whatever humor is available. The book needs to be read as one chunk if you want to appreciate how its tone and structure contribute to that theme. I feel you’re attributing to lack of authorial skill something that can just as easily be read as both entirely intentional and extremely effective.
hey, what do you mean by “relentless grind”?
I’m doing a project on this book and the teacher said I have to say what the theme was, and I’m stuck!
Yeah I gotta disagree with the way the reviewer presented the book as well. It sounds horribly like he just read the first couple chapters and skimmed the rest. At its most playful the book is hilarious, and at its most serious the book is terrifying and relentless in convincing you that what you perceive to be reality is like staring at four walls and thinking you’re looking at the universe.
David Wong actually tries to convince you to just put the book down and walk away several times in the story, lest your perception of what makes up the world come shattering down around you. The absurdity of some of the humor only serves as a much needed buffer when the philosophy that drives the story gets too cryptic and chilling to otherwise continue reading. It’s just one of those stories where, sure, you can take it at a completely comical look at the horror genre, much like what “Shawn of the Dead” did for zombie movies, or you can really start to analyze it to the point where it gets to be too much, and you really just have to walk away a few minutes, or wait until its light outside to start reading again.
Overall the story is intelligent, and needs a lot of picking apart before it can even begin to make sense. It is truly scary on many levels, and also one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. So you just keep chuckling at the Fred Durst and Jennifer Lopez references, and I really hope you have fun. After all, it would take actual thought to see the story for what it really is, and you clearly aren’t a fan of the whole thinking thing. The story draws you in from page one, hooks you there, and refuses to relent. I found out about it through the chan communities, but I would suggest it to any being capable of sentient thought, you will enjoy it, and probably lose some sleep at night. I know I did.
This must be the first time I’ve received negative comments … for a positive review. Mr. Wong must have quite the protective posse.