Post by mdorman

I don't remember why I first picked up John Dies at the End. It's a determinedly weird book, and then there have been four more. The latest came out yesterday; I was expecting to start reading it to distract myself from the midterms, but, uh, got distracted.

Anyway, I started it this afternoon, and was already laughing from the first non-preface paragraph. This is from There Are No Giant Crabs In This Novel: A Novel Of Giant Crabs:

Texting does to human communication what an outbreak of dysentery does to a ball pit. As such, I’m confident my friend John will be remembered by history as the master of texts that managed to create dozens of questions without imparting a single piece of actionable information. They literally subtracted knowledge from the world. Take this one that arrived at dawn on what was forecast to be the coldest day of the decade:

U up? Cops need us at spirit nothing to look at a log of body parts

The only part of that I understood was that we were needed at Spirit Nothing, which is what everyone called the abandoned department store across town that was vacant for the ten months of the year it wasn’t a Spirit Halloween. I definitely didn’t know what a log of body parts was or why it needed to be looked upon at this hour, by me or anyone else.

I won't pretend that they aren't occasionally disturbing—there's some stuff from the second book that sometimes shows up in the corners of my nightmares—but mostly the sheer boneheaded determination of the character's reactions in the face of Lovecraftian horror makes me laugh. The Zoey Ashe novels and the one-off I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom are also amusing, and not quite as distressing.