John Dies at the End
Sep. 3rd, 2018 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackOh gosh, this book is hard to describe. It started as a web serial, and was eventually published. By David Wong, who, if I got this right, is executive editor at Cracked.com. David Wong is a pen name he adopted for his online writing, and also wrote into these stories as the main character.
It's a riotous embracing of style over coherency. The main character and his friend, John, are two flaky drop-outs who've stumbled into a position as trouble-shooters of various sorts of occult problems.
I hear the film adaption stops there, with a "random slackers save the world" plot, with them blundering from one crisis to another endlessly well-meaning but endlessly screwed up.
The book does more although it's hard to describe what. The underlying reality isn't especially more coherent, there's various sorts of occult happenings that don't seem completely consistent with each other. But there's a lot more going on with the characters. As someone points out, you start by pegging David as the responsible one and John as the screw up. But in fact, David is better at holding a job, but John is better in almost every other way, nicer to people, better to his friends, less bitter, etc.
It's often funny. It's occasionally terrifying.
For a book called "John dies at the end", it kept me guessing all the way through whether, well, John would die at the end, which is a pretty impressive achievement.
I'd lost track, apparently I did read his unrelated novel Futuristic Violence and Men in Fancy Suits before, which likewise had a so-so plot but really great characters and intermittent but great humour.
It's a riotous embracing of style over coherency. The main character and his friend, John, are two flaky drop-outs who've stumbled into a position as trouble-shooters of various sorts of occult problems.
I hear the film adaption stops there, with a "random slackers save the world" plot, with them blundering from one crisis to another endlessly well-meaning but endlessly screwed up.
The book does more although it's hard to describe what. The underlying reality isn't especially more coherent, there's various sorts of occult happenings that don't seem completely consistent with each other. But there's a lot more going on with the characters. As someone points out, you start by pegging David as the responsible one and John as the screw up. But in fact, David is better at holding a job, but John is better in almost every other way, nicer to people, better to his friends, less bitter, etc.
It's often funny. It's occasionally terrifying.
For a book called "John dies at the end", it kept me guessing all the way through whether, well, John would die at the end, which is a pretty impressive achievement.
I'd lost track, apparently I did read his unrelated novel Futuristic Violence and Men in Fancy Suits before, which likewise had a so-so plot but really great characters and intermittent but great humour.