John Dies at the End by David Wong

Good evening fellow book nerds! Tonight I am going to tell you all about one of the funniest books I have read in a long time. A least the funniest fiction novel I've read in a long time. Most definitely the funniest sci fi/fantasy book I've ever read.

John Dies at the End is the story of John (the same as in the title) and Dave (the author and narrator). John and Dave are two twenty-something slackers that live in a small Midwestern town Dave calls "Undisclosed for reasons that will become obvious later".

Strange happenings begin to occur in Undisclosed one evening when a levitating Jamaican introduces John to a new drug called "Soy Sauce". The soy sauce provides the user with a heightened sense of awareness. It also opens up a new realm of reality allowing the user to see things normal people can never see with the naked eye - monsters wearing wigs, Ronald McDonald eating his own intestines, demons composed entirely of cockroaches, etc.

Also thanks to the soy sauce, John and Dave become a sort of target for all kinds of super natural beings. They find themselves in a number of different skirmishes with all nature of creatures always accompanied by their super natural creature spotter of sorts, Molly the dog, who at one point in the story explodes but later reappears unharmed. The story culminates in a meeting of the minds between John and Dave and an all-powerful demigod named Korrok who ends up insulting the size of Dave's manhood and calling him gay.

I know I'm not being very thorough with my plot description and I'm sorry for that. It's a hard book to recap. John Dies at the End is really a collection of a number of different smaller stories. It began as an online serial blog posting by David Wong, the pseudonym for Jason Pargin. (Pargin is the editor in chief of Cracked.com, one of my favorite websites. Check it out if you get a chance.) Unfortunately, you can tell the book was a serial. The stories aren't tied together all that well. The main characters are the same but that's about it. It shifts from ghost story to monster story to alien story to alternate universe story and back again leaving major plot holes in its wake.

But, all that being said, this book was freakin' funny. There were just too many one-liners to even mention. At one point John and Dave are battling a demon made of meat (hams, summer sausages, turkeys, etc.) and Dave is worried about being "sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist". The humor distinctly reminded me of a cross between Zombieland and Army of Darkness. It's crass and juvenile and there is an over abundance of penis and fart jokes but they're funny penis and fart jokes. But I also had to wonder if someone who wasn't so up on pop culture would get a lot of the jokes.

I do know that I could not have found two more different books to read back to back, if you remember my previous blog posting. No one can accuse me of not having eclectic taste in my literature of choice.

All in all, I'm going to give John Dies at the end four bows. It was laugh out loud funny but had some gaping plot holes that I just couldn't overlook. They're filming the movie version now so I am excited to see what they do with it. Until next time, happy reading everyone!