John Dies at the End: Updated Special Edition

A crazy roller coaster from start to finish, you're in the authors hands, and he knows it. It's terrific, off the wall, and a great time.

First book in a long time that made me chuckle out loud. Awesome characters, wild ride of storyline, just all around great book.

Try this experiment: Flip this book open to any random page and then start reading. No matter what page you've flipped to, there's going to be something hilariously funny on that page. Seriously. Every damn page. The entire book is so overstuffed with comedy that you could choke a clown with it. Okay, so maybe you could choke a clown with most books. Forget about the clowns. My point is that this is an incredibly funny book. There's a lot of other stuff going on besides the humor, including some very unsettling horror, interesting plot twists, etc., but it's the comedy that holds it all together. And that comedy is frickin' awesome.

If you blended the works of Lovecraft and Kevin Smith, then mixed that with about three parts pure awesome and left it to grow behind your fridge, you might get a vague sense of the genre David Wong bullseyes with this book. It's funny enough to appeal even to non-fans of the horror genre, yet scary enough to stay with you for a long time. It's the sort of book that can raise specters so horrible you tell yourself you couldn't ever have imagined them, yet it keeps your faith in humanity alive with the way Dave and John (especially John) seem to casually flip off a barrage of unspeakable evil. In a book that opens fighting meat-ghosts with '80s glam rock, you know you're in for something special. It's all about the soy sauce, a mysterious substance that "chooses" its takers and imbues them permanently with an ability to pick up on the doings of other dimensions. In the short term it can provide an insight into spacetime so profound as to tell them just where to go to get a large sum of cash, or how a chicken lived its life before becoming an entree. It's also the key to an invasion from the beyond, but it doesn't end there. The evil wants in, at any cost, and it's not above even cheap schoolyard-style bullying to get its way. Luckily, Dave and John know just how to handle that. The bizarre thing about this book is that it is literally laugh-out-loud funny, but at the same time it's hide-under-the-bed scary. It is neither horror with comic relief nor comedy with a horror theme. It's both pure comedy and pure horror, two books coexisting in one, which should be impossible but somehow David Wong can pull it off. It kept me hooked right up to the end, for more reasons than just to find out how John dies.

Most everyone can identify with the narration of this book. It asks questions about the seemingly mundane and then provides you answers that delve into a creepy supernatural world. The situations are hilarious, the twists are unexpected, and the horror is perfect. All three combine to create a truly enjoyable tale about two unlikely heroes and their exploits in a supernatural infested hometown. Pick it up, read it, and love it. You will not regret it...and the velvet Jesus will love you for it.

David Wong may be the only author on the planet (or at least in the midwest) who can combine off-the-wall silliness with mind-numbing terror. If this book does not cause you to laugh, cry, and piss yourself in fright then you may want to check the bottom of your left big toe for a pi mark.

This book by up and coming horror/comedy writer David Wong is one of the scariest novels I've read in a very long time. It's not the sort of scary where you're actually scared while reading. Mostly you will be amused, entertained, and probably a bit surprised at parts. The real terror comes once you try to sleep the next night, and the night after, and the night after that and so forth. I haven't slept a full night in the years since I first read John Dies At The End and this is the reason the state took away my driver's license.