John Dies at the End

July 13, 2009
In this reissue of an Internet phenomenon originally slapped between two covers in 2007 by indie Permutus Press, Wong—Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin's alter ego—adroitly spoofs the horror genre while simultaneously offering up a genuinely horrifying story. The terror is rooted in a substance known as “soy sauce,” a paranormal psychoactive that opens video store clerk Wong's—and his penis-obsessed friend John's—minds to higher levels of consciousness. Or is it just hell seeping into the unnamed Midwestern town where Wong and the others live? Meat monsters, wig-wearing scorpion aberrations and wingless white flies that burrow into human skin threaten to kill Wong and his crew before infesting the rest of the world. A multidimensional plot unfolds as the unlikely heroes drink lots of beer and battle the paradoxes of time and space, as well as the clichés of first-person-shooter video games and fantasy gore films. Sure to please the Fangoria
set while appealing to a wider audience, the book's smart take on fear manages to tap into readers' existential dread on one page, then have them laughing the next.

September 1, 2009
Two wisecracking slackers attempt to thwart an invasion by supernatural beings.

When smart but troubled video-store employee David gets a peculiar late-night phone call from a friend, he assumes John is just having another of his semi-regular drug- or alcohol-induced freakouts. But as progressively more bizarre events unfold over the next few hours, David realizes that things are different this time. It turns out John had spent the preceding evening with a man with a fake Jamaican accent named Robert Marley and had taken a strange drug called Soy Sauce, which gives users incredibly heightened awareness—along with a few odd side effects that all too often include a grisly demise. By the next afternoon, David has also inadvertently taken some Soy Sauce, been dragged to the police station for questioning about a series of gruesome deaths and received another odd call from John, after John has expired in the interview room next door. Things only gets stranger from there, as David and John (who doesn't stay dead for long) discover they are the thin, oddball line of defense between life as we know it on this planet and dark invaders from somewhere else entirely. Originally offered online in serial form, Wong's debut is creepy, snide, gross, morbidly dark and full of lots of gratuitous weirdness for weirdness' sake, not to mention penis jokes. So why is it so funny? Perhaps it's the author's well-tuned eye for the absurd, which gives his tale a compelling-against-all-odds, locker-room-humor-meets-Douglas-Adams vibe. The characters are also unexpectedly sharp, rarely the kind of two-dimensional cutouts frequently found in genre fiction. While the clunky text sometimes reads as though Wong had shoved together several different episodes against their will, it nonetheless satisfies narrative demands that could have conflicted. When it's funny, it's laugh-out-loud funny, yet when the situation calls for chills, it provides them in spades.

Lowbrow, absurdist horror/comedy that works—a difficult trick to pull off.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 12, 2009
Eponymous protagonist Dave Wong and his considerable jerk of a best friend, John, are exterminators of demons, hunters of the unknown, warriors for good against evil, but all they really want is to be left alone. Like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure crossed with Shaun of the Dead, this is a loopy buddy-movie of a book with deadpan humor and great turns of phrase. Verdict Just plain fun. It was originally published at Cracked.com, and will appeal to readers of Christopher Moore.

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2009
Originally published online to enthusiastic response at Wongs Web site, Wongs novel has now been updated and repackaged for readers less inclined to get their fiction from a computer screen. Buddies John and David are recent college dropouts nurturing the usual youthful obsessions with girls, music, and recreational drugs. Then along comes an illicit concoction called Soy Sauce that offers a gateway to previously unseen dimensions populated by alien creatures with unsettling predilections. Even worse, the Sauce that John deliberately and David accidentally ingest gives the creatures access to the human dimension. Soon the guys are battling shadow men and wig monsters while struggling to keep friends and family from being sucked into an identity-erasing wormhole. The good news is that the pair may just have enough video gameinspired savvy and philosophical pluck to save the world from an evil invasion. While much of Wongs humor and many of his cultural references seem tailored to younger readers only, the author strikes enough of a balance between hilarity, horror, and surrealism here to keep anyone glued to the story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)