John Dies at the End is not one of those books.
I'll start this review with a little backstory as to how I discovered this book. I have been an avid reader of Cracked.com for years. For those of you who have browsed the site, you undoubtedly know that is is one of those websites that you can get lost in, opening fifty new tabs for articles that seem interesting. You also know that the humour used in those articles is not particularly sophisticated, but it's witty enough to create a few laughs out of sheer absurdity and amusing parallels.
David Wong, the author of this book, is the editor of Cracked.com. I've known his name for years. So when I used an online recommendation site to look for more books similar to my favourite author, Chuck Palahniuk, I was surprised to see a familiar name in the list. Without even reading a synopsis, I pressed the download button on my nook for John Dies at the End, hoping that it would be just as engaging as David's writing on his famed website.
I was not disappointed.
As I said before, this is not one of those books that pulls you in to the fantasy world. The main character is not a portmanteau of what the reader could be in this situation. He is not an everyman, and neither is he someone to be aspired to. What this book does is create a detachement, an unreliable narrator that pulls you through the ridiculous events of his life with an aire of "I know you won't believe me, but listen to this shit I had to go through."
The fantasy world created in this book is that of the supernatural, but created in a way that someone never truly understands what's going on. The main character doesn't even understand it.
The first chapter includes the main character and his best friend, John, going into a 'haunted house' and being faced with a monster that takes on the form of a large humanoid figure made entirely out of meat from the downstairs freezer, completely with a cow's tongue for speech.
Then things get weirder from there. The basement fills with raw sewage as they try to escape the monster, then when they try to use the door, the handle turns into a realistic penis that neither character is willing to touch for fear of some form of homoerotic pleasure the monster may gain from it.
You find out through the story that the two characters were thrust into this world of the supernatural by the drug curiosity that plagues those in their early twenties. A mysterious man with a fake jamaican accent gives them a drug called "Soy sauce," which is itself living. It turns them temporarily into demigods, able to go through space and time and inexplicably be able to know the entire history of the person or object in front of them. These side effects only last a few hours at most, but from that moment on, John and David can see the invisible monsters from other dimensions that find their way into our world.
It's a story of trying to save the world, and being completely and utterly unprepared for it. It's a story that uses ridiculous situations to illustrate the absurdity of the world they see.
And it's fucking awesome.
If there was one book I could recommend to you, it would be this one. That's why I'm avoiding putting any spoilers in this review, because I legitimately want you to go out, download, buy, or borrow it and enjoy. It is one of those books you won't be able to put down for fear of missing something important and ludicrous.
And if that hasn't pushed you to go find it, here's a trailer of the upcoming movie based on it. What surprised me the most is that, after reading the book, I can literally recognize every single scene in this trailer. I'm excited for the movie, because it has me thinking that it very well could be an extremely faithful adaptation.
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