Books to Die For

David Wong's JOHN DIES AT THE END

One of the things I love most about horror is just how diverse genre storytelling can be. It encapsulates everything from rather sedate and chilling ghost stories to completely batshit crazy, over-the-top yarns that are positively exploding with grue and monsters. 

Thus far, all the Books to Die For have fallen somewhere between these two extremes, but today's book, David Wong's JOHN DIES AT THE END, definitely stakes its claim on the wild and wooly side of things. Perhaps you've already seen the 2013 film adaptation of the same name, so you have some inkling of what I'm talking about. 

Of course, the story of the writing, revising and eventual publishing of the novel is almost as wacky as the story contained between its two covers. So let's crack open the feature we did on Wong and his comedic horror novel back in January 2103 to get to the bottom of both.

From Rue Morgue #130:

The novel began its life back in 2001 as an online serial, something popular now, but unheard of then. Author David Wong (pseudonym for Jason Pargin) posted new installments every Halloween, roughly the length of a short story. 

"I was afraid if I tried to send it to a publisher they'd mail it back soaking wet, along with a photo of an intern urinating on it," says Wong of his decision to release the book free on the web. "I had never written anything for publication in my life, so I was resigned to just trying to entertain a few friends by writing silly things on the Internet. As a form of rebellion, I was literally trying to write the most unpublishable thing I could think of."

Sure enough, JOHN DIES AT THE END practically defies summary. The horror comedy is split into two "books" and a lengthy epilogue that reads almost like a series of related novellas about our pair of unlikely heroes and the brewing inter-dimensional war they've been pulled into after sampling the alien, mind-expanding substance they call Soy Sauce. It's one part raunchy screwball comedy, one part monster-fighter yarn, and one part gloriously splattery, absurd B-movie; when folks call JOHN DIES "batshit crazy," it's not an exaggeration. Over the course of the careening 384-page novel, Dave and John have a showdown with a raw-meat man, witness a wall made from from sentient limbs, chase thousands of cockroaches who have taken the form of a man in order to steal Dave's car, attempt to avoid deadly swarms of highly infectious mutant insects and come face to face with more than one inter-dimensional portal - with the whole thing relayed in first-person via Dave's personable slacker slang.

"[JOHN DIES] was basically a Halloween prank on the readers," explains Wong of the story he rolled out over the course of five years. "The idea was that it started out as a traditional campfire ghost story - about the time me and my friend went to a haunted house - then the plot just got steadily more and more insane, essentially testing the reader to see how long they could stick with it before it just got too stupid for them."

Wong went on to edit and hone his manuscript and, in 2007, JOHN DIES AT THE END landed him a book deal with Permuted Press. (It was later re-released in hardcover in 2009 by Thomas Dunne books.)

"The meat of the story didn't change, but the text did," says Wong of his revisions. "There are a lot of boring writer reasons for this - writing for the Internet flows differently than writing for print; I could circle back and add some background/foreshadowing to flesh out parts I knew were coming later, which couldn't be done when it was a serial - and also I think I just got better at writing between the time it went up online and when it started getting pressed into wood pulp."

If you like your literature to resemble madder-than-mad B-movies and this has piqued your interest. JOHN DIES AT THE END is available in hardcover and paperback (in a variety of editions, including one with the movie poster as its cover, pictured top). It's also available as an eBook. 

Beware the Soy Sauce.