Book Review: John Dies at the End by David Wong

You need to read this book.  This is not a want, this is a need.  Not convinced yet, well inject yourself with a dose of an inter-dimensional super drug and read on.  John Dies at the End is novel written by David Wong, [Blu-ray] the psuedonyme of Jason Pargin and the lead editor of Cracked.com.  If you have visited the web site then you know a little bit of the craziness behind the cover.  Minor Spoilers Ahead

     The story revolves around two twenty something go know-where slackers, John and David, whom are living in an undisclosed town somewhere in the Midwest.  The story begins when the pair meet a Jamaican man at a show they are performing at, to which David nicknames him “the Floating Jamaican,” due to his apparent ability to levitate.  Things quickly escalate, or devolve, depending on the how one interprets it.  Both John and David, John by choice and David by accident, are exposed to Soy Sauce.  Soy Sauce is the slang term for a drug that causes some exceptionally strange effects including trandimensional communication, levitation, foreknowledge, the ability to see things that the human mind was not meant to, etc, etc.  The stuff's abilities are similar to hooking the entire internet up to your brain and trying to process it all at once.  So to say that Soy Sauces effects are unpredictable and chaotic is an understatement.  With the help of the Sauce our “hero’s” attempt to stop an interdimensional conspiracy bent on the domination of earth.  I do not want to spoil too much and to be honest it would be an undertaking just to put the gonzo plot to a concise summary.

     The tone of the novel varies widely from splaterpunk horror, to gross out humor, to deep reflective character building, to gonzo weirdness, to existential horror.  A normal story mashing all those parts together produces a mess, an ambitious mess, but still a mess.  John Dies at the End though produces almost seamlessly a coherent whole out of all the parts with only what I can assume is black magic.  I found myself intensely reading with a growing sense of dread on one page and then the next having to place the book down, literally, because I was laughing so hard.  This book does it all, and does it well.

     Lovecraft’s influence here is unmistakable but it turns the narrative on its head.  Instead of a well read, exceptionally brilliant, occult antiquarian facing off against unspeakable horrors we get the opposite.  We get John duct taping a Bible to a baseball bat to use as a weapon and the pair feeding a dog a Testamint, breath mints with scripture on them, to see if the dog is ok.  Mind you, the dog was levitating at the time and then promptly exploded in tiny dog giblets.  The pair are winging it hoping to get by with whatever “knowledge” they have accumulated, which is not a doctorate in Occult Studies with a thesis focusing on the Necronomicon.  This is a reflection you and me facing off against the horrors of an uncaring universe and completely making a mess of things.

   I cannot recommend this book more highly, oh and the pair go to another dimension that they call “Shit Narnia.”  What more can be said.

Who will like this:  Anyone who is fan of Lovcraftian stories, anyone who ever laughed at a video of someone being kicked in the crotch, general horror fans, and those that enjoy a truly surreal crazy literature.

Who will not like this: People who want more traditional New York Times bestsellers, pompous jerks who say they do not read books they read literature, and anyone with a sensitive gag reflex.