A review by jcschildbach
John Dies at the End by David Wong

5.0

This is one of those five-stars-for-me-but-maybe-not-for-you ratings (as opposed to a 5-star 'this-book-is-definitely-a-classic-work-of-literature' rating). The book falls into a jumbled genre that essentially combines horror, sci-fi, and comedy. It involves evil punching a hole into our universe through the use of a self-generating drug referred to as soy sauce. The narrator, David, and his friend, John, a pair of slackers from a mid-sized nothing of a town, which happens to be a jumping-off point for evil from other dimensions, experience the full effects of the drug (such as being able to see various shadow-beings and other evil entities that others cannot), but are somehow seemingly immune to it's side-effects, which generally include some form of psychosis, physical mutation, and/or violent death, which often involves exploding or otherwise being dismembered. Their new-found, drug-induced abilities then allow David and John to become paranormal investigators of a sort, who in turn cause a lot of exploding and dismembering of those who have been infected by evil. Explaining things much further would be rather time-consuming and lead to numerous spoilers. Wong has excellent pacing, moving things along quickly, with plenty of graphically disgusting, yet hilarious, descriptions of everything from skin-burrowing, egg-laying bugs, to dogs with universe-saving explosive diarrhea, to alien scrota pressed against glass in surgical theaters, while also cleverly weaving in points of emotional connection with the characters. Check it out.