[Read aloud to Adelle]
John Dies at the End by David WongJason Pargin.
I got this book because I heard about the narrative style and it intrigued me. Indeed it lived up to my hopes with its breathless insanity – David is quite squarely an unreliable narrator, prone to exaggeration and digression, but also unrelenting in his commitment to telling a story with little regard for truth or consistency.
David and his best friend John dropped out of college and accidentally became the local experts on unnatural occurrences in their town, with many bizarre things happening around them, drawn to them like a magnet.
The stories David tells revolve around a substance, which he calls soy sauce, I hesitate to describe it as a drug although that is its closest correlate in our world, which expands the mind and abilities of the ingester, allowing them to perceive details unavailable to those without access to the substance. This allows the protagonist to see things others cannot. A blessing and a curse, the world is at once more horrific and makes more sense when his eyes are opened in this way.
Some of the discontinuities are explained along the way, however I still find myself piecing bits of the story together, even after finishing the book. And there are still so many things that don’t make any sense. Like the title – by my calculation the only way John actually dies at the end is if that is when you figure out what happened to him. For me that was somewhat after the end, I’m not very quick at this sort of thing. I’m not going to tell you, you have to read the book yourself and see if you can figure it out quicker than I did.
There are insects. Oh, so many insects. And they do so many things, in such detail you might want to skip over some of those bits, I wish I had had that foresight.
This book is the most insane book I have read, more so than Fear and Loathing or The Illuminati Trilogy. I am glad there are more books in this series, I’m not ready to let go of this mad universe yet.
I haven’t mentioned this before: if you would like to borrow any of the dead tree books I talk about, let me know and I will get them to you.
