JOHN DIES AT THE END (BY) DAVID WONG

Published 2009, 373 pages

Characters: B+

Writing: B

Plot/Pacing: B-

Poignancy: A

John Dies At the End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pagrin aka David Wong, has a history almost as complicated as the story it tells. Originally written as an online serial before transforming into the hardcover available in bookstore's today, Wong's publishing success is a heart-warming DIY underdog tale, just as John Dies At the End is a heart-warming underdog tale of one man's obsession with his own penis.  Secondary to that, it's also the story of two friends confronting supernatural evil and the fragile, tenuous nature of reality.  As pure page-turning entertainment, Wong's novel succeeds so effortlessly that one might not even notice just how unconventional the book's narrative and voice are. JDATE is a headcrab that clings to your skull and just won't stop humping your brain.  It's possibly a classic of its genre — assuming you can settle on a genre to put it in — the rare story that successfully combines comedy and horror without ever trivializing its characters or sacrificing inventiveness.  So yes, the horse I'm trying to beat here is this: John Dies At the End is original.  Shockingly so — and I mean that, despite the comedic, casual tone, this book is actually shocking. The horror isn't just there as a sort of foil to bounce penis jokes off of — well, sometimes, maybe — but with all the wild ideas presented in JDATE, some of them are going to keep you up at night. 

The comedy is largely driven by the novel's nonchalant protagonists, eccentric video-game generation small-town twenty-somethings Dave and John.  The two serve as both straight-men to the increasingly surreal events unfolding around them — glib and dismissive in the face of supernatural evil, as if the possibility of humanity's extinction was just more bullshit foisted upon them by a world they already knew to be unrelentingly stupid — and also the source of the comedic tone, nearly matching the surrealist horror around them for batshit crazy unpredictability.  Yet they aren't played cheaply — their deadpan, cynical view of the world is increasingly linked to a dark, very-real childhood. With a few deft moments, Wong connects the cruelty of adolescence with something far vaster and more terrifying.  For all the cheap laughs, Dave in particular becomes a vivid, wholly original character, and one that remains recognizable and real even when he's bouncing between a haunted shopping mall and an alternate dimension he dubs "Shit Narnia."  Even the side characters — though often hazy, due to their limited screen-time — reveal Wong's discerning eye for small town eccentricities, and I suspect that JDATE will be far more poignant to anyone who grew up in a middle-of-nowhere suburban dive.  The voice and tone are perfect for capturing this secondary source of horror and humor, one that acts as an undercurrent to the main story — that sense of going nowhere in a place that you truly can't stand, of having no options.  It mirrors John and Dave's confrontations with evil itself — they are not heroes, they are not on an adventure, and the best they can manage is to dodge every life-threatening encounter in time for their next shift at the local video rental store.

With such subject matter, it would have been easy for Wong to render his plot as silly and inconsequential, but the drama here is often poignant — there's an unrelenting sense of danger and dread, of hopelessness and futility, even if Wong scripts a few too many Shock and Awe moments into the proceedings.  Some may find the rapidly escalating plot in JDATE overly surreal and confusing, but I believe its wild ambition to be the reason the novel resonates so well.  Wong doesn't stop with the usual sampled staples of supernatural horror: ghosts and arbitrary Christian iconography.  Those elements are there, but they're brought into a universe much vaster in scope, tied to a conspiratorial narrative that's only superficially similar to the basic "demon wants to invade earth" structure.

John Dies At the End isn't perfect, of course.  Even with its unique, possibly alienating approach to an already narrow genre, it's a messy, flawed book, though not in a particularly negative way.  Shouldn't horror — especially of this scope, with this voice, with multiple levels of Unreliable Narrator — be a little messy, anyway?  Nonetheless, it is often apparent that Wong's book was written in segments, despite many edits and additions.  The pacing is consistently relentless, but if you think too hard about how some of the plot elements go together, things start to get a little confusing.  I'd much rather read fiction that overreaches than an author playing it safe and predictable, so I don't hold it against Wong.  There's nothing particularly tidy or safe about the narrative voice to begin with — John Dies At the End deserves abundant praise for realizing that dumb, flippant humor can exist without dragging the whole story down to the same level, and Wong is anything but lazy with his ambitions.  The result is a real bender — clever, original, both exciting and disturbing.  It gets in your head — an achievement that should never be overlooked or discredited, no matter the methods.