Penis Jokes and Parallel Universes

A Review

After debating for awhile exactly how I should make my grande Lost Snark debut, I decided to go the literary route.  That’s right, I’m going to make this blog classy from the outset, because I’m an intellectual, dammit.  And I’m going to do so by telling you about a book that has more cock jokes per chapter than a Stephanie Meyer novel has mentions of the word “adonis” per page.  I’m telling you... This is going to be classy.

The novel in question is John Dies at the End, a work that began as an internet phenomenon a few years back and grew in popularity at a near exponential rate through word of mouth alone.  It got so popular, in fact, that now it’s going to be a movie directed by Don Coscarelli and starring Paul Giamatti.  It’s written by David Wong (not his real name), the current editor of the superior Mad Magazine alternative Cracked.com and anyone who’s enjoyed one of Wong’s articles over at Cracked might think they have some small idea of the sort of things they might come across in JD@tE.  Make no mistake, however; they are dead wrong.  But let’s get a small plot summary out of the way before we go any further.

Our narrator, David Wong, finds himself in quite the hellish situation when his slacker buddy John Cheese gets high on an iffy-at-best drug called “Soy Sauce” at a party.  It isn’t long before David accidentally pricks himself on the same needle John used to dope up with and then things start getting really weird.  For one, the drug seems to be made of a sentient black tar.  So that can’t be good.  For another, the side effects are more intense than one would expect from a run of the mill opiate.  Such as being able to read minds, say.  Or look down at the KFC chicken you’re chomping on and suddenly know how this particular bird lived it’s life from birth to feces-covered, PETA offending death.  Or maybe, like, being able to see demons and ghosts and a variety of other mind altering shit.

As one might expect, this is just the beginning.  There’s a few hundred pages to go after the Sauce is introduced, and in those pages can be found homemade flame-throwers, exploding dogs, alien abductions, demonic possessions, car chases, parallel universes, and baby-headed scorpion monsters wearing wigs.  Oh and there’s this one demon guy made of bratwurst and venison, too.

Now, the thing to understand is that this book is weird.  Hella weird.  Almost off-puttingly weird at times.  After the 14th time our heroes round a corner and come face to face with yet another crazy ass penis-monster from some other world, we’re a little bored with it.  What saves us from totally giving up on believability is the fact that Wong is completely aware of the fact that he’s running into an disproportionately high number of penis-monsters from another world and comments on this just about every time the reader starts thinking it.  But is JD@tE worth reading, even knowing all that?  The answer is a resounding YES.

You see, the thing is that it’s not just goofy and sardonic and filled with potty humor and weird creatures.  It’s also truly creepy as hell.  One moment you’ll be snickering like an 8th grader because there’s been a dick joke or three on the page, and the next moment Wong hits you with a concept or a scene that is so utterly disturbing that it stops you cold and you suddenly want to turn on a light and make damned sure you didn’t see a shadowy figure out of the corner of your eye.  And the humor isn’t all juvenile or scatological in nature.  There are moments of true laugh-out-loud satire, and anyone who enjoys movies like Evil Dead 2 or Bubba Ho-tep will be right at home with the odd brand of humor on display throughout.  At times the book reads as a sort of hodgepodge of Douglas Adams, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ren & Stimpy.

Of course, it isn’t for everyone.  The story is hacked up into four or five “books” and feels a bit stretched thin in places.  You can tell quite clearly that it started out as a webserial that was published in tiny chunks, and the narrative begins to suffer as new characters are introduced and then abandoned fifty pages later.  At the end of the day, though, it proved to be one of the more entertaining books that I’ve read in the last decade or so, and if you’re at all like me, you won’t be disappointed.

I’ll give it 4 Penis Monsters From Another World out of 5.