John Dies @ The End

This one is a bit tricky to summarise. I think I’ll just let it do it itself.

‘My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours.

You may not want to know about the things you’ll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrock, about the invasion, and the future. But it’s too late. You touched the book. You’re in the game. You’re under the eye.

The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.’

Nothing encourages me to read a book like one that threatens me with consequences if I don’t. John Dies @ The End by David Wong (pseudonym of Jason Pargin) is a freakish cult phenomenon that I came across entirely by accident a couple years ago when I was buying a last minute book for my long train ride home from university for the summer.

I think it’s important to note at the top of this review that I don’t read horror. I get scared easily. I don’t like it. That said, John Dies @ The End is one of my favourite books ever. So. People contain multitudes.

Technically I think you would probably call David Wong’s work comedy horror, but something about that classification makes me uncomfortable, because I feel like it diminishes the book somehow. It’s not comedy horror like Sean of the Dead (literally my only other reference point because I don’t like horror not even funny horror). It’s more absurdist than that. In other reviews, a lot of writers have compared him to Douglas Adams (but with way more gory death, obviously) but that comparison doesn’t really work for me either.

Honestly, at least so far as my own reading is concerned, John Dies @ The End is totally unique.

(I’ll just let that statement settle for a moment).

This book occupies a very special place in my heart I have thus far been unable to adequately explain to anyone. Today I’ll give it my best try.

Reading this book is a visceral experience. I really mean that. You will cringe and be grossed out so hard I would actually say you should leave a decent gap between reading and eating. At least on the first couple times through it. I just read it for the fourth or fifth time so my tolerance is pretty high.

David Wong seamlessly works through the truly haunting and the absurd, the freaking hilarious and the deeply sincere – sometimes all on the same page. To read this book is to be perpetually off balance. It’s thrilling and frightening. The experience is to constantly ask yourself what could possibly happen next? And then there’s the underlying doubt that David might just be a crazy person. He admits that he occasionally makes up a few details. As your get further into the book it gets ever more apparent when he’s doing it (although I might just think that because I’ve read it so many times).

Ultimately though, I believe David. I don’t think anyone could read this book thinking that he was just a guy who’s done way too many drugs (although he might be that, too). Remember I mentioned the sincerity in this book? Yeah? Well, that’s all David. Nobody writes about self-loathing like David Wong. It permeates his every action. Usually, I think, books like this are concerned with taking action that, secondarily most of the time, has the effect of taking down people’s deep insecurities. People who save the world usually feel pretty good about themselves by the end of the book. Not David.

I want to make clear, as well, that this is not in any way annoying to read. David isn’t just a guy feeling sorry for himself. He’s had some truly awful experiences – some of which he will never ever tell us about, others, we witnessed with him – and as a result he’s come to see the world in a very black and white way. There’s good and bad, and he knows which side he falls on (spoiler alert: it’s not good). David suffers with a lot of suicidal ideation throughout the story.

He survives because of his friends, John, of the title and Amy, who is central to everything but doesn’t really appear until the second half of the book. I LOVE this choice. John Dies @ The End is pretty long, and seeing David alone for so much of it before introducing Amy, the girl he falls in love with, is so effective. I want to take this book and slap every writer who ever went down the instalove route over the head with it. John and Amy are a part of the horror, but they somehow manage to remain separate from it. It doesn’t engulf them the way that it does David.

John is the comic relief. He’s the guy who spent his youth watching a lot of movies and is not-so-secretly thrilled that he finally gets to be the hero in his own horror story. He also really wants you to know about the size of his penis.

(supposedly it’s big).

Amy managed to avoid the horror once, when it took her brother. A year or so later and in the second half of the book, it comes back for her. With it come John and David.

Amy is a lonely girl. She lost her parents and her left hand to a car accident a few years previously. Then her brother died under circumstances that were as mysterious as they were horrifying. As a result, she’s become a resilient young woman and I love her. She and David complement each other in every way. I don’t even care that her optimism being drawn to David’s despair is kind of a cliché because it’s awesome.

Amy is a girl who knows what she wants. She’s not afraid to take control of her own path even when doing so puts her in harm’s way. She pushes David in the right direction (i.e. one where he doesn’t kill himself).

She also kind of ruins his life because it’s a lot easier to fight an unknown evil when you don’t care about anyone, least of all yourself.

It’s not very interesting, though.

Honestly, John Dies @ The End has everything, as far as I’m concerned. It’s unique, adventurous, romantic, depressing, hilarious, horrifying and sincere. It’s like nothing you’ve ever read before.

If you’ve read through to this point I recommend looking the book up on Amazon. Go to ‘look inside’ and read the first page of the prologue. Depending on how you feel after, you’ll know whether or not this book is for you.

Top Ten Tuesday: Halloween Special

The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter

You know the story of Bluebeard, right? When he isn’t looking, his innocent new wife stumbles into the one room in their house he keeps locked – his make-shift tomb, filled with the bodies of his murdered lovers.

Moral of the story: If your new husband has a locked room in his house/ship that he’s weirdly evasive about, run away.

John Dies @ the End – David Wong

I know I’ve mentioned this one before. But it’s one of my favourite books ever. It makes sense that it would come up a lot.

‘STOP

You should not have touched this book with your bare hands.

No, don’t put it down. It’s too late.

They’re watching you.

My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you’ll read on those pages, about the sauce, about Korrock, about the invasion, and the future. But it’s too late. You touched the book. You’re in the game. You’re under the eye.

The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.’

This was a random bookshop find for me. You get why I had to buy it, right?

This Book is Made of Spiders – David Wong

‘Warning: You may have a huge, invisible spider living inside your skull. This is not a metaphor.

You will dismiss this as ridiculous fearmongering. Dismissing things as ridiculous fearmongering is, in fact, the first symptom of parasitic spider infection – the creature secretes a chemical into the brain to stimulate scepticism, in order to prevent you from seeking a cure. That’s just as well, since the “cure” involves learning what a chainsaw tastes like.’

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

This book is a manifestation of all the Victorian fears around scientific and technological progress. Mary Shelley wants us to consider the idea that someone, somewhere has probably built a man from the parts of various dead men, and that he’s feeling pretty murderous about it.

Lot No. 249 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A student at Oxford University reanimates an ancient Egyptian mummy. It runs around the city murdering anyone it can get its hands on.

This story serves to answer the question we’ve all wondered: What are the weird noises we can hear in the flat upstairs? A reanimated ancient Egyptian mummy, of course.

Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime – Oscar Wilde

During a dinner party at a friend’s house, Lord Arthur is informed by a famed psychic that it is his destiny to become a murderer.  Lord Arthur is horrified by the revelation, and resolves to get the awful deed out of the way as soon as possible in order than he can marry the woman he loves (it is not right, in his mind, to marry before so horrible but inevitable a task is completed). As such he sets about attempting to commit a murder. However, killing someone is not as simple a business as he would have imagined.

Until it is.

One night on his way home from work, Arthur sees the psychic who caused him all these problems leaning on a bridge, staring down into the water. One quick push later, Arthur has achieved his task and is now free to marry his girlfriend, Sybil.

Dracula – Bram Stoker

A vampire invades London, frightening its men and corrupting the innocence of its good 19^th century ladies.

Reading this book you can’t help but wonder if Bram Stoker’s real fear isn’t the monster he describes, but instead the possibility of female sexuality. When one of the female characters turns into a vampire she becomes an overtly sexual being. The men’s reaction? Cut her head off.

Grasshopper Jungle – Andrew Smith

‘In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny, hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things.

This is the truth. This is history.

It’s the end of the world.

And nobody knows anything about it.’

Warm Bodies – Isaac Marion

In this book a zombie falls in love with a girl and gradually starts become human again. It’s one of the only zombie-related stories I have ever read.

It’s in this list because cute romance or not, the zombie apocalypse terrifies me. I have decided that were it to happen, I would rather go early. I would rather be a happy brainless zombie than live in that world as a human. This fatalistic attitude may have sprung from the fact that I live right down the road from a graveyard, so if the zombie apocalypse were to go down, I would be totally screwed.

The Name of the Star – Maureen Johnson

This book is about ghosts. Specifically, the ghost of Jack the Ripper. You can imagine what he must be up to. It’s the job of Rory and her gang of ghost hunters to bring the murderer down. Hopefully for good, this time.

5 Weird Reads

Sometimes real life gets kind of boring.

Boredom is contagious. It infects all areas of your life. Sometimes – and I hate to admit it – boredom even invades your sacred reading space.

YA has trends like everything else after all. There are only so many dystopian novels a person can read, you know?

I might have a solution.

5 Weird Reads to Get You Out of Your Real Life and/or Reading Rut:

1. Going Bovine – Libba Bray

Cameron has mad cow disease. He’s going to die. Unless he does as the hot angel Dulcie tells him to, and takes his hypochondriacal dwarf buddy, Gonzo and an angry Viking gnome across America in search of a cure. And defeat the evil United Snow Globe Wholesalers in the process, of course.

2. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender – Leslye Walton

This book is a beautiful example of magical realism. The story weaves throughout the tragic history of the Roux family. Ava Lavender, a girl born with wings, traces back through the saddest stories in order to find her place in the world. Is she an angel, or just a girl? Can she be both?

3. The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman

Bod is the only living resident in a graveyard. It’s hard to grow up around the dead, but it comes with certain perks. Bod knows about to fade, like a ghost. It’s a killer move for hide and seek, but sadly Bod doesn’t have anyone living to play that with.

4. Grasshopper Jungle – Andrew Smith

Austin and Robby may have accidentally brought about the end of humanity by accidentally releasing an army of unstoppable, six foot praying mantises in Iowa. Unstoppable praying mantises who pretty much only eat and fuck, which wouldn’t be so bad if their diet weren’t strictly human.

5. John Dies @ the End – David Wong

This book isn’t YA, and absolutely isn’t for younger readers, but remains one of the weirdest pieces of fiction I have read ever. Basically if you take the soy sauce Korrock (evil God of evil) becomes your responsibility. You can’t un-learn about the invasion (led by Korrock). Once you’ve taken the sauce you must fight the forces threatening to enslave humanity. This might involve killing the same two headed creature with the same ax twice.