John Dies at the End

John Dies at the End

Cover of the Permuted Press edition, now out of print
Author	David Wong
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Horror, comedy
Publisher	Permuted Press
Publication date	August 15, 2007
Media type	e-Book, print
ISBN	978-0-9789707-6-5
OCLC	186537812
Followed by	This Book Is Full of Spiders

John Dies at the End is a comic horror novel written by David Wong that was first published online as a webserial beginning in 2001, then as an edited manuscript in 2004, and a printed paperback in 2007, published by Permuted Press. An estimated 70,000 people read the free online versions before they were removed in September 2008. Thomas Dunne Books published the story with additional material as a hardcover on September 29, 2009.^[1] The book was followed by a sequel, This Book Is Full of Spiders, in 2012 and What The Hell Did I Just Read in 2017. A film adaptation by Don Coscarelli was released in 2012.

Plot summary[]

This section's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (December 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The novel begins with a short prologue story that introduces us to the main characters and some background information. Dave and John are pair of slackers who live in an unnamed midwestern town (referred to in the novel as "Undisclosed") where they, through a series of bizarre events, have become paranormal investigators. The prologue takes the reader through a typical investigation, this one involving a poltergeist made of frozen meat products.

The main story is told in two parts, labeled "Book 1" and "Book 2". There is a framing story, where Dave is recounting the origin of his and John's unusual abilities to a human interest reporter from a national magazine, named Arnie. He meets Arnie in a local restaurant, and the main storyline is intercut with scenes between the incredulous reporter and Dave's multiple attempts to prove the veracity of his increasingly bizarre story.

The main story begins with Dave and John at a party, where John is performing with his band. At the party, Dave is followed by a dog named Molly (as indicated by its nametag) and John and several other friends hang out with a drug dealer named Robert Marley. Dave leaves the party early, and overnight receives an incoherent phone call from John; Dave goes to pick John up to take him to the hospital, but John convinces him not to and the two head to Denny's. John reveals that he has taken a drug known as "soy sauce" and shows Dave a syringe containing the drug. Dave pockets the syringe. The two attempt to return the dog Molly to her owner, "Big" Jim Sullivan, who was at the party with the two protagonists, but they learn from his sister Amy that he had never returned home. Late for work, John and Dave head to the video store where they work, and while there Dave accidentally injects himself with the drug in his pocket (somewhat mysteriously, as he had broken the needle off the syringe earlier) and begins to feel the effects of the drugs. Shortly thereafter Dave and John are picked up by a local police officer named Lawrence Appleton (but who Dave refers to as "Morgan Freeman" as he forgets his real name).

The detective informs Dave that everyone from the party except himself are either dead or missing, and that John himself is dead (Dave soon learns this was incorrect). Dave escapes the police station, and as instructed by John in a phone call, travels to the home of Robert Marley, where he finds a basement full of bizarre sights. Detective Appleton meets Dave in the trailer, shoots him, and sets the trailer on fire. Dave miraculously survives the incident, rescued by a faulty bullet and the quick action of John and the dog Molly. John and Dave gather the remaining survivors of the party, which include "Big" Jim Sullivan, Jennifer Lopez (unrelated to the musician), and Fred Chu. The group head to Las Vegas to meet with Albert Marconi, an expert in the paranormal, who is holding a conference at the Luxor Hotel. En route to Las Vegas, Detective Appleton kidnaps the group, taking them there himself, while both Fred and Appleton are taken over by a malevolent force known as the Shadow Men (taking the form of hundreds of tiny white bugs) takes over their bodies, forcing the rest of the group to kill them.

Book 1 ends at a climactic battle scene at the Luxor between the remaining members of the party (John, Dave, "Big" Jim, and Jennifer) joined by Marconi on the one side, and the forces of the Shadow Men on the other, in which "Big" Jim is killed. John and Dave return home and resume their lives, with Dave beginning a romantic relationship with Jennifer, and Dave and John seeing less and less of each other over the next year or so.

Book 2 starts one year later, when Dave and John are called in to help investigate the apparent death of a local sportscaster, Danny Wexler. He is alive, but possessed by Shadow Men. With the help of Wexler's girlfriend, Krissy, John and Dave track down the possessed Wexler after being nearly killed by various creatures made by the Shadow Men. Despite nearly being possessed, Dave manages to exorcise Wexler.

The next summer, Dave notices that someone is watching him through his television set. One winter night, he has an episode of missing time, around the same time Amy disappears. Dave, fearing he may have accidentally killed Amy, searches his house, and only finds what he is certain is a dead body in his toolshed. On the verge of a breakdown, Dave recovers when John calls him, having found Amy. Investigating her disappearance, John and Dave find more of the strange symbol that was found in the fake Jamaican's trailer, along with an unusually high volume of Shadow Men.

Tracking the Shadow Men, John and Dave, with Molly and Amy in tow, find a hidden entrance in an abandoned mall, leading to a multi-dimensional bazaar. Fighting their way through strangely human guards, the two wind up in another dimension, where they are greeted by strange, masked cultists who call them "chosen ones". It turns out they were "chosen" by a massive, God-like, eldritch biological computer, Korrok, who commands the Shadow Men in a bid to conquer all possible universes for consumption and amusement via acts of mass genocide and torture. They are informed that through their use of the Soy Sauce, they are now the "chosen" vectors through which the Shadow Men will invade their world.

Through knowledge granted through their use of the Soy Sauce, John and Dave built an incredibly explosive bomb prior to their journey into the mall, unwittingly hidden from the cultists by Molly, who ate it. Escaping their captors, the two flee with Molly just as the bomb detonates. Their captors had hoped to destroy Dave's dimension with a species of rapidly breeding insect introduced into a duplicated version of Amy. The duplicate is thrown back into their dimension at the last minute, destroying their dimension instead of Dave's.

An incredulous Arnie refuses to believe Dave, even after being shown one of the monsters the Shadow Men summoned. Dave, after Arnie refers to himself as black, realizes Arnie is, in fact, a ghost modeled on how Dave imagined him to be, and reveals the real Arnie - dead in the trunk of his car. Arnie panics, and disappears.

Sometime later, John and Dave find a portal to another dimension on their yard. Traveling through to a post-apocalypse world, a paramilitary organization tells them they are chosen ones who will save them. Annoyed, John and Dave leave, and watch as unwitting teenage archetypes travel through the portal and save the dimension.

Characters[]

David Wong: Author surrogate and the novel's protagonist. Dave narrates the novel from the first-person perspective. Dave is self-conscious and sarcastic, thus his narration is unreliable as the truth (he says he has been "mostly" honest with Arnie, and thus the reader). Dave is a slacker who works various minimum-wage jobs in his local town; during the timeline of the story he works at a video rental store.

John: Long-time best friend of Dave. John is frequently under the influence of various drugs, and Dave's need to rescue John from various difficult situations propels the plot forward. His band is playing at the party that opens the main storyline.

Molly: Molly is David's adoptive dog, an "Irish rust dog", whose tags indicate she previously belonged to the Sullivan family. Dave finds Molly at the party at the beginning of the main storyline. When Dave tries to return the dog, they refuse to receive it, and it follows Dave around for most of the story.

Arnie Blondestone: A journalist investigating paranormal affairs, his interview with Dave provides a framing story for the main events of the novel.

Robert Marley: A drug dealer present at the party at the outset of the story, he provides a drug known as "soy sauce" that either kills its users or gives them supernatural powers.

Jennifer Lopez, "Big" Jim Sullivan, Fred Chu: Three party-goers who were all present at the party at the start of the story that sets the plot in motion. The three of them join John and Dave on the trek to Las Vegas in Book 1. "Big" Jim and Fred are killed in the events, while Jennifer (whom Dave has had a crush on since high school) ends up dating Dave for a while during the period between the two main storylines.

Amy Sullivan: Timid sister of "Big" Jim Sullivan.

Detective Lawrence "Morgan Freeman" Appleton: Detective in the Undisclosed Police Department, he starts investigating the deaths of several of the party goers, but becomes obsessed with the case, and changes from an investigator to trying to actively stop the evil that is operating in Undisclosed. He reminds Dave of a famous African-American actor, which Dave mistakenly thinks is Morgan Freeman.

Doctor Albert Marconi: A former priest, and current lecturer on Paranormal Activities, he acts as an advisor of sorts to Dave and John.

Danny Wexler: Local sportscaster who possession by The Shadow Men provides the inciting incident in Book 2.

Krissy Lovelace: Danny's neighbor who initiates the main investigation in Book 2.

Korrok: Believed to be an evil deity worshiped by several different cultures in human history, Korrok serves as the novel's major antagonist, with many of the demons encountered by David and John throughout the novel acting as his servants. Korrok is depicted in many ways, both physical and metaphorical.

"Shitload": One of Korrok's supernatural minions. Shitload's natural form consists of a swarm of small, white insectoids comparable to rods described in cryptozoological theories.

Reception[]

Reviewer Bryan Gatchell considered it "a horror novel parody," saying, "The story combined the horror of the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and the surrealism of Heironymus [sic] Bosch painting with the early 20s (i.e., their age) asininity of its two main protagonists, David Wong and John... [T]hey can see things no other human can see such as shadow men, demons, floating worms, obscene fast food murals, ghost doors, men observing them through the television and dog-sized, wig-wearing, scorpion-like creatures... Wong is much more at home when it comes to the humorous aspects of the story... Strangely enough, the best moment of the novel has neither to do with horror (in the traditional sense) or humor. The novel becomes the most gripping when David describes a violent incident as a high school student. The rest of the novel is amusing, but at this moment, the novel breaks away from its jokey Internet origins and seems to come into its own as a genuinely good book."^[2]

The book received a positive review in The Guardian, with reviewer Eric Brown comparing it to the works of Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson and writing "it may be a farrago of nonsense, but it's also unputdownable thanks to great narrative pace and its pair of likeable layabouts".^[3]

A review in Publishers Weekly was positive, saying "the book's smart take on fear manages to tap into readers' existential dread on one page, then have them laughing the next".^[4]

A review in Kirkus Reviews criticised the writing as "clunky" but ultimately praised the book, concluding "when it’s funny, it's laugh-out-loud funny, yet when the situation calls for chills, it provides them in spades".^[5]

Sandra Scholes, writing a featured review on SF Site recommended the book, stating "for those who like to delve into the realms of the unreal and offbeat, this is a really good one".^[6]

Sequel[]

A sequel to the book, This Book Is Full of Spiders, was published on October 2, 2012. It originally had the working title of John and Dave and the Fifth Wall before Wong announced the official title. Part of the book was originally hosted on the official website under the title of John and Dave and the Temple of X'al'naa'thuthuthu, but was removed from the site. Wong later re-posted the excerpt on the website in February 2009, but removed it the following year.

A third book in the series was released on October 3, 2017, under the title What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror.

Film adaptation[]

Director Don Coscarelli purchased film rights to the book;^[7] and subsequently wrote and directed the film adaptation.^[8][9]

Filming began on October 21, 2010. The movie stars Paul Giamatti as Arnie Blondestone and Clancy Brown as Dr. Marconi, with Giamatti also helping to produce.^[9] Actors Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes play the lead roles of Dave and John, respectively.^[9]

The movie premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2012^[10][11] and was released as an independent theatrical film the following day.

References[]

External links[]

• Official website
• "Web Posts Earn Deals For New Authors", Publishers Weekly, October 6, 2008
• The Second Supper review of "John Dies at the End" Dead Link 23-10-13