A few years ago, my father pushed into my hands Dan Brown's atrocious and stupidly entertaining Angels & Demons. "It's an airplane book," he told me. "What do you mean?" I asked. "It's the kind of book you read on the airplane and then leave there once you finish it." I read it and I can't help but agree. Dan Brown is the perfect Airplane Author (he's also a shit author, if you ask me. But that's neither here nor there.)
I feel similarly about David Wong's first novel, John Dies at the End. It runs literary circles around Dan Brown's Hindenburg, obviously, but it's an airplane book. John Dies at the End is a weird, creepy, scary, and wildly entertaining story, but it's weighed down by a number of problems, including its length. It's by no means my awful, and it's not a story I would revisit, but it got me through my trip from LAX to Washington Dulles, and it made my 4-hour layover in JFK pass by very quickly ("Four hours?" you ask. Yeah. It sucked.)
The premise and promise of John Dies at the End is that Hell is not other people--it's in another dimension, and it's disgusting, filthy, horrifying, eldritch, Cthulu-esque High Octane Nightmare Fuel. John and David are thrown into this world by pure misfortune, and we follow them as they deal and slash-and-hack their way through the horrifying and traumatizing experience of another dimension, one from which demons, monsters, harpies, maggots, cockroaches, shadow-people, and shit-entities come.
It's hilarious, too. David Wong is the Editor-in-Chief of Cracked, and he knows how to humor his audience (which I'm assuming is the 18-30 male demographic). I found myself consistently turning the pages for hours on end because the descriptions, the tone, the narrator's voice, everything about it is so delightfully horrific that I couldn't stop reading. It's weird and it doesn't stop being weird until the end. I'm sure I got more than a few looks when I would burst out laughing while waiting for my flight to arrive.
But there are a few problems with Wong's novel. First, David narrates the story to a journalist throughout the novel, which I found completely unnecessary. In fact, I almost groaned every time the novel returned to the interview because it felt like such a waste of time, and the point of this sub-plot is some twist near the end, one that isn't particularly riveting and doesn't contribute to the rest of the story. Secondly, the supporting characters are utterly forgettable. I'm not exaggerating. If you were to ask me to describe the supporting cast without using names or physical descriptions, I'd give you a blank stare. Some of them die, some of them don't. One of the more important female leads sticks around only for half the novel, which is a problem in and of itself because I invested some emotion into thinking she was important. Then, by the second half, she just disappears. Not cool, Wong.
Interestingly, the biggest problem with the novel was the thing I was just praising a few moments ago: its voice. Let me explain myself using a novel familiar to anyone who's read horror: The Shining. Stephen King's novel is absolutely one of the scariest books of all time. Say what you will about him now, but King crafted a novel that was taut, tense, and downright terrifying. The line between reality and delusion crumbled as the suspense built, and the worst part was that you didn't see a damn thing. Sure, there were instances of blood and visceral horror (e.g., the woman in the bathtub, or the two little girls in the hallway), but for the most part you were kept in the dark. As a result, your imagination filled your ignorance with vague sensations of dread. This is the same reason why Alfred Hitchcock's famous film, Psycho, continues to haunt viewers to this day. In his words, it's a matter of "transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience." Nothing a writer or director can offer you will top the horrors your mind conjures up on its own.
It's something I wish David Wong had kept in mind. One undeniable fact of Wong's novel is that it's weird. It's visceral, it's gory, it's delightfully brutal, it's macabre, and it's unapologetic when it shoves its descriptions of tentacled, oozing shit-monsters, or humanoid demons composed of thousands of rattling cockroaches, or swarms of white fly-like winged harpies that corkscrew into human flesh and take up residence inside victims' brains. But by describing its monsters so vividly, the novel strips them of what truly makes them horrifying: their mystery. This is fine for horror books, as not every scary story needs to be as psychological as The Shining. But for a novel of this length (and weighing in at 469 pages, it's quite large), you need more than just gross descriptions to carry the reader's attention. It's the difference between Paranormal Activity and Hostel. The former weighed entirely on the viewers' imagination and as a result it was a phenomenal success, becoming the most profitable (proportionally to its budget, mind you) film of all time. The latter was a mindless, misanthropic, sadistic gore-fest that lacked all self-awareness and was too enamored with bloodshed to really say anything at all.
I don't mean to sell John Dies at the End short, but by midway through the novel it began to feel tedious. The risk inherent in any over-the-top, profane, unapologetic character is that he's exhausting to listen to. This is why J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye wasn't 400 pages long: I'd have burned the book by the end because I can only listen to Holden Caulfield complain for so long. That's why John Dies at the End works so well for the first half (and don't get me wrong, there are good parts in the second half, too). But after listening to David Wong talk about penises and demons and penis demons, I was ready to close the book. I kept reading to see how John dies at the end, and even that wasn't satisfying. As the second arc to the story begins, John thinks to himself, "Here. We. Go. Again." It's supposed to sound exciting, but when I read it, I could only muster up resignation.
I feel similarly about David Wong's first novel, John Dies at the End. It runs literary circles around Dan Brown's Hindenburg, obviously, but it's an airplane book. John Dies at the End is a weird, creepy, scary, and wildly entertaining story, but it's weighed down by a number of problems, including its length. It's by no means my awful, and it's not a story I would revisit, but it got me through my trip from LAX to Washington Dulles, and it made my 4-hour layover in JFK pass by very quickly ("Four hours?" you ask. Yeah. It sucked.)
The premise and promise of John Dies at the End is that Hell is not other people--it's in another dimension, and it's disgusting, filthy, horrifying, eldritch, Cthulu-esque High Octane Nightmare Fuel. John and David are thrown into this world by pure misfortune, and we follow them as they deal and slash-and-hack their way through the horrifying and traumatizing experience of another dimension, one from which demons, monsters, harpies, maggots, cockroaches, shadow-people, and shit-entities come.
It's hilarious, too. David Wong is the Editor-in-Chief of Cracked, and he knows how to humor his audience (which I'm assuming is the 18-30 male demographic). I found myself consistently turning the pages for hours on end because the descriptions, the tone, the narrator's voice, everything about it is so delightfully horrific that I couldn't stop reading. It's weird and it doesn't stop being weird until the end. I'm sure I got more than a few looks when I would burst out laughing while waiting for my flight to arrive.
But there are a few problems with Wong's novel. First, David narrates the story to a journalist throughout the novel, which I found completely unnecessary. In fact, I almost groaned every time the novel returned to the interview because it felt like such a waste of time, and the point of this sub-plot is some twist near the end, one that isn't particularly riveting and doesn't contribute to the rest of the story. Secondly, the supporting characters are utterly forgettable. I'm not exaggerating. If you were to ask me to describe the supporting cast without using names or physical descriptions, I'd give you a blank stare. Some of them die, some of them don't. One of the more important female leads sticks around only for half the novel, which is a problem in and of itself because I invested some emotion into thinking she was important. Then, by the second half, she just disappears. Not cool, Wong.
Interestingly, the biggest problem with the novel was the thing I was just praising a few moments ago: its voice. Let me explain myself using a novel familiar to anyone who's read horror: The Shining. Stephen King's novel is absolutely one of the scariest books of all time. Say what you will about him now, but King crafted a novel that was taut, tense, and downright terrifying. The line between reality and delusion crumbled as the suspense built, and the worst part was that you didn't see a damn thing. Sure, there were instances of blood and visceral horror (e.g., the woman in the bathtub, or the two little girls in the hallway), but for the most part you were kept in the dark. As a result, your imagination filled your ignorance with vague sensations of dread. This is the same reason why Alfred Hitchcock's famous film, Psycho, continues to haunt viewers to this day. In his words, it's a matter of "transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience." Nothing a writer or director can offer you will top the horrors your mind conjures up on its own.
It's something I wish David Wong had kept in mind. One undeniable fact of Wong's novel is that it's weird. It's visceral, it's gory, it's delightfully brutal, it's macabre, and it's unapologetic when it shoves its descriptions of tentacled, oozing shit-monsters, or humanoid demons composed of thousands of rattling cockroaches, or swarms of white fly-like winged harpies that corkscrew into human flesh and take up residence inside victims' brains. But by describing its monsters so vividly, the novel strips them of what truly makes them horrifying: their mystery. This is fine for horror books, as not every scary story needs to be as psychological as The Shining. But for a novel of this length (and weighing in at 469 pages, it's quite large), you need more than just gross descriptions to carry the reader's attention. It's the difference between Paranormal Activity and Hostel. The former weighed entirely on the viewers' imagination and as a result it was a phenomenal success, becoming the most profitable (proportionally to its budget, mind you) film of all time. The latter was a mindless, misanthropic, sadistic gore-fest that lacked all self-awareness and was too enamored with bloodshed to really say anything at all.
I don't mean to sell John Dies at the End short, but by midway through the novel it began to feel tedious. The risk inherent in any over-the-top, profane, unapologetic character is that he's exhausting to listen to. This is why J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye wasn't 400 pages long: I'd have burned the book by the end because I can only listen to Holden Caulfield complain for so long. That's why John Dies at the End works so well for the first half (and don't get me wrong, there are good parts in the second half, too). But after listening to David Wong talk about penises and demons and penis demons, I was ready to close the book. I kept reading to see how John dies at the end, and even that wasn't satisfying. As the second arc to the story begins, John thinks to himself, "Here. We. Go. Again." It's supposed to sound exciting, but when I read it, I could only muster up resignation.
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