It's really difficult to explain how much I like John Dies at the End. It seems like such a dumb, silly little book - it's full of meat monsters and demons with idiot senses of humor and assless leather chaps - but it's also full of harsh introspection and questions about relationships.
I don't think anyone looks to books like this to be anything other than ridiculous romps but I keep finding more each time I read it. It's a hefty chunk of words for a horror-comedy novel, clocking it at over 450 pages, and I guess if you're going to cover that much ground in a book a lot of it is going to stray outside of what can easily fit into a single genre or a cover blurb. But I never stop feeling surprised when I start paging through it and realizing how sad it's making me while I'm also having a great time reading it.
David Wong is one of my favorite authors at Cracked. He is one of the few writers for a failed Mad Magazine rip-off who has ever made a significant change in the way that I live my life. A lot of his articles are grounded in the way that humans define happiness and the way to make yourself a measurably better person and I suppose someone who writes those sorts of articles for a dick-joke dispensary is the same kind of person who can cram human drama and important questions about life into a book about two idiots taking a drug that lets them fight a Fred Durst fan named Shitload in order to save the world.
If you haven't read this book, please do. It's unspeakably entertaining and way more literary than it has any right to be and full of magic dark and light and all its own. I'm still kicking myself for not reading it when it was first published instead of waiting a few years because that means that I missed out on a few years of having this great story kicking around in my head.
Cheers,
- Alli
Wong, David. John Dies at the End. Permuted Press. 2012. OP 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment