John Dies at the End

I just finished reading David Wong's (aka Jason Pargin's) John Dies at the End, a novel of Lovecraftian horror, suburban malaise, and utter silliness.

Actually somewhat like my own Dispatches from Otherworld, "JDATE" originally took the form of online media written over time. As such, the story does have a somewhat episodic nature.

The book has a frame narrative after a brief prologue in which David Wong - the pseudonym serving also as protagonist - meeting with a journalist in a ridiculous Chinese restaurant to discuss his work as a paranormal investigator. A few years back, David and his friend John Cheese (a fellow Cracked.com writer) took a strange drug referred to as "Soy Sauce" (John intentionally, David accidentally,) which allowed them to see the horrific supernatural threats that apparently surround us all the time.

David and John, along with the occasional (sometimes short-lived) ally then attempt to fight off - or at least make something of a dignified stand - against the immense powers arrayed against our fragile world. They do all of this while never losing their personalities as bored, shiftless suburban 20-somethings in a dull minor midwestern city (referred to as "Undisclosed.")

The eponymous John is a creature of pure Id, and unsurprisingly pushes the more wary and weary David into these lethal shenanigans. I don't want to go into too much detail about the story itself, as a great deal of the fun of the novel is seeing what batshit crazy thing is going to come next. Just as a quick example - at one point David is forced to use a McDonald's Bratwurst (which is apparently a thing in the midwest) as a cell phone to talk with John across time.

What I find particularly resonant in the story is the way that it gets the feel of being an aimless young man in a suburban environment. In between years of college, I'd spend the months with my friends back in Newton, Massachusetts typically driving around at two in the morning, goofing off for lack of anything better to do. It would not have been too out of place for us to go into weird houses with ghosts and otherworldly monsters at the time. In fact, I have a friend back home who reminds me a lot of John.

There's a movie that came out in 2012 based on the novel, and despite a couple of big names (Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown,) I didn't hear much about it or see it coming to theaters. While I believe it's on Netflix now, I'm slightly hesitant to watch it, given that if it's anywhere as gory as the book, I might have trouble sleeping, like, ever again.

John Dies at the End could certainly be considered a parody of Cosmic Horror, but it's a solid enough parody that you might find yourself fairly unnerved reading it.