Another one you may have missed

John Dies at the End.

It's a title that defies the reviewer not to spoil anything.  I've been putting off this review for a full week simply due to the sheer daunting task of trying to do this book justice without detracting anything from going into the book fresh.  In order to put off the most difficult task until the end, I'll start by giving a little background on the book itself.

John Dies at the End is a creature unto itself, pock-marked by the acne scars of the Internet's adolescent phase.  True to form, author David Wong wrote John Dies at the End in installments on his website of the same name, giving his product away for free to those curious enough to check in with the site regularly to see the story progress.  One would be hard-pressed to brand Wong's rogue authoring a failure, with John Dies at the End now available in paperback (and unfortunately no longer available free on his site), with a possible movie release coming in 2010 and a sequel already in the works.

So... is it worth a read?  Absolutely.

But.

Understand that I give this recommendation as a mid-twenties white American male.  I am the target demographic here.  I'm not trying to pass judgment, but rather give some perspective on where I'm coming from in writing this review.

The story of John Dies can basically be summed up thusly: if you took the premises of Ghostbusters and Clerks and asked Terry Pratchett to toss in an homage to Slaughterhouse 5 and get 350 pages out of the thing, you'd have a pretty close approximation of what you see here.  The focal characters of John Dies are the narrator and possible Mary Sue wankfest David Wong and his friend John Cheese, the Dante and Randall of our story--a couple of loser burnouts that play their roles to a T, right down to one of the characters holding down a job at a video store.

When they take a street-drug going by the name "soy sauce," suddenly, they find themselves hurtled into terrifying lucidity.  Suddenly they gain the ability to trace the very strands of the fabric of the universe, flipping the bird to Heisenberg and his shitty little uncertainty principal.  They find themselves unstuck in time, existing across the myriad of timelines spanning the multiverse.  The trip and the subsequent side-effects are short-lived, but our heroes are forever changed by the journey.  They see horrors existing in a reality parallel to our own--ghosts, trans-dimensional travelers, monsters--and soon discover that these malignant forces can see them back.  Naturally, John and David carry this sudden inversion of all known laws of nature and physics to is logical conclusion: finding a way to get paid. Faster than you can say "inadvisable career move," the pair find themselves paying the rent doing a job that's one part Ghostbuster and two parts unwilling and unwitting heroes amidst a plot that threatens the very universe, which is still a step up from working at a video store, if you think about it.

But to describe John Dies only by discussing the plot is to do a great disservice to what makes it such a great book.  For one thing, it's funny.  Not always "laugh-out-loud" funny, but at several points during the read I found myself snickering, going back and re-reading the straight-man/funnyman exchanges between David and John or scenes of depravity illustrated in vivid comedic hues. What really makes it work is Wong's fantastic sense of delivery and timing.  The character perfectly captures the voice of a disaffected, male, twenty-something loser barely able to cope with life in the real world before suddenly playing prison-bitch to a gang of trans-dimensional insect-monsters.  David is not the typecast protagonist this genre typically calls for.  When he finds himself a major player at the center of a trans-dimensional plot, it is his anger and desire to just get out of the thing that sees him through.

Much of the action of the book takes place within the framing device of an interview with a magazine columnist, with David trying to get his story out to the public once and for all.  It's a strong choice for the narrative--David may not be a relateable hero, but he has a powerful, uncompromising narrative style that makes his account of the action very fun to read and easy to follow.  Wong is a vivid, visceral writer with a talent for appealing to the senses.  David's cynical and ugly perspective on the world is palpable to the reader.  Everything has a layer of grime to it, and every chapter feels as though it is desperately in need of a good scrubbing.  I'm reminded of one passage in particular where David is force-fed a giant spider and describes, sparing no putridity, the crunch of the hairy carapace just before swallowing the writhing, salty meal about three bites too early.  I want to compare it to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but understand that I am not comparing the work of Thompson and Wong on any other merit than this particular stylistic choice.  Nothing is beautiful in John Dies--the world it depicts seems sick, each page oozing humor both witty and bodily.

For the first 200 pages, this made for a fast read.  Every creature David describes is a portrait of something truly deranged.  Rather than trying to describe things familiar to the reader: mummies, vampires, wolfmen, etc., Wong cobbles together grotesque amalgamations from the spare parts of nightmares, stuff that pushes the boundaries of the reader's imagination.  There is no comfort in familiarity.  Though David and John's enemies are legion, it never seems like a disposable swarm--each new encounter is a feast for the mind's eye.

Unfortunately, Wong's powerful style isn't entirely to the story's benefit.  For instance, whereas David and John both have distinctive voices as characters, the rest of the cast seems to be a reflection of John, right down to the distinctive cadence of his dialogue.  While this can, in part, be forgiven due to the aforementioned framing device and much of the story being told in David's own words, it does make the novelty of a stylish narrative wear off that much quicker.  And once the story returns again to the present, the transgression becomes inexcusable: the people need to talk different from each other or else they're swallowed whole.

Moreover, Wong plays to his strength a bit too much.  David's critical view of the world never really changes.  Other characters change around John and David, but the protagonists never do.  And when the story peters out in the unmarked epilogue and denouement, it seems like Gandalf the White returning in blinding glory just to do the "how'd-that-quarter-get-behind-your-ear?" trick.

Past the 200-page mark, things definitely take a turn for the weirder.  The comedy-horror seems to get shelved for a trans-dimensional fantasy that, while still satisfying, signifies a gear-shift with an almost audible ka-chunk.  The tight horror narrative opens up into a sprawling world that, to his credit, Wong feels no need to explain.  My best friend wrote in his blog (citation to follow, assuming his permission) of a Miyazaki film that there is no need to explain everything.  That leaving some things a mystery expands the boundaries of the story's world, and while the world of John Dies may not be entirely enriched by the sudden tidal wave of accumulated minutia of a whole new world introduced at the start of a third act, it certainly does not allow itself to lose steam by getting bogged down in the details.

For the same reason, I thought Silent Hill 3 was a distinct step down in quality from Silent Hill 2 because it tried to give some background on the town and why it was suddenly such a malignant force.  Silent Hill 2 understood that it didn't matter why.  Things are terrifying when you don't know why they are.  The parallel world of John Dies is fantastic because we don't know anything about it--and adding an extra 50 pages telling us more wouldn't do any more than a paragraph of the bizarre happenings of a bizarre world.

John Dies invites its readers into its world just so long as they promise not to ask too many questions.  As horror/sci-fi/fantasy goes, the suspension of disbelief it requires is admittedly pretty high up there.  If you watched The Matrix and thought "why don't the robots just use cattle as an energy source?" you're probably not going to enjoy this one nearly as much as a willing observer along for the ride.  This is one where a passive reader is probably going to get more out of the experience than a stickler for detail.

In all, it's a satisfying read and a legitimate Internet-age breakout hit.  You can't get it for free anymore, but as trade paperbacks go, you could do a lot worse.