In life, there are many questions that we must ask even if it comes at great cost to ourselves; Questions about the legacy we will leave behind not just for our children, but our children’s children… Questions about the larger universe at hand and our role in it… Questions that we can spend night after sleepless night trying to conquer, questions that we fight with our friends and family with, both literally and figuratively. None of these can compare when the question before is this;

‘What if HP Lovecraft had a penchant for writing comedies instead of racism?’ The answer would Jason Pargin’s ‘John Dies at the End’.

This was a story I very much wanted to sink my teeth into for months before it was even announced to be December/January’s book. It sat on my TBR list since September that same year, mocking me as I read other stories in the interim. Not that I needed one, but when our chapter leader said it was our next read, I finally had a good reason to read it… And continued to put it off until the end of January anyway.

John Dies at the End takes a very loose and only semi-serious approach to its story which feels like the best approach when viewing the novel as an outsider looking in. Pargin originally wrote the story as a web serial in the early 2000’s (Which goes a long way to explain some of its edgier humour) before being published in the latter half of that same decade. It’s why some of the cliffhangers and reveals sometime feel like they’re lines straight out of a bad soap opera leading into an ad break.

But all of this just compounds into the charm that this books just exudes from the first page. Yes, the prose can be oddly written at times, and yes, the humour occasionally reeks of that post-9/11 comedy ‘schtick’, but the lack of polish and Pargin’s refusal to play it safe makes for a hilariously compelling read. How many books can you name open with a metaphysical paradox about the Ship of Theseus while the narrator/protagonist is being attacked by a reanimated zombie? If the answer to that question is more than ‘one’, you are lying.

The ’Macguffin’ this time around is a little concoction called ‘Soy Sauce’ that allows users to perceive layers of our world that they would have had no idea about in the first place and is the reasons why our kickass heroes David, John, and Amy are able to interact with several comprehensible incomprehensible horrors, including the antagonist of the first act of the book, ‘Shitload’. I promise this will make sense in the course of time if you haven’t read this book already.

I’m happy to spoil the first act of the book as I think the latter two are much better in comparison; Not that this first third is without its moments, it just feels like most of the obligatory worldbuilding and establishment of characters (And there’s a lot of it here) gets crammed into the first ~150 odd pages. It’s frankly a testament to Pargin’s writing that it works as well as it does.

After the opening with the Ship of Theseus and the zombie, we’re thrusted into David’s world before and after taking the Soy Sauce where hilarity ensues and we’re introduced to some of the driving forces of the story including the demon known as Shitload who needs to make it to Vegas while a show is happening so he can bring about the end of the world.

There’s a few nice subversion of expectations here largely to do with the titular with whom this narrative is named after and also the story that doesn’t go in the expected directions. John himself is a very funny character who just steals every scene he is in and plays off very well with our straight guy David while we hurdle with our seedy drug dealer who we will see more of… Nope, he just exploded in his living room, or the police officer who will certainly save the group from peril… Nope, he just got shot in the chest.

This is where some of the some of that oddly written prose rears its head, and my first thought was that maybe Pargin was having a rough time trying to write certain scenes revolving the dog Molly doing a very poor job of driving and occasional references to a character we haven’t met. I was about to handwave some of these moments to continue along until the bombshell reveal toward the end that there actually was another person travelling with them who disappeared in the final confrontation in Vegas against Shitload; A person who fell into some goop and got literally erased from their timeline with only lingering fragments of memories of this person remaining.

David is describing all of these events to a journalist from out of town after the facts, and while the ‘Unreliable Narrator’ comment gets thrown around a lot in some of our book discussions, here’s an example of that taken into an entirely different perspective that changes the context of almost every single page we have read up to this point and flipped it on its head… And we’re only a third of the way into the book.

The first third undoubtedly has a more comedic tone to it that is not entirely without some of the trademark horror that makes this book as well known as it is, but its largely based in the more ‘implied’ horror if that makes sense; Sometimes the gap left between fiction and reality makes the mind conjure its best haunts.

I was never really an easy scarer growing up when it came to literature or movies, and still am not. I can understand how parents struggle to read Stephen King after having kids, or watch movies of unsuspecting teenagers camping at some ridiculously dangerous sounding lake. Even after reading ‘Salem’s Lot’ as a kid and ‘Call of Cthulhu’ as an adult, the only real time something ‘scared’ me was an old Doctor Who story called ‘The Pyramids of Mars’ when the Doctor has to explain and show Sarah Jane her future, and why they can’t just leave and let Sutekh win… In the Doctor’s words, our world becomes ‘…A desolate planet circling a dead sun’. That is the scene that has stuck with me throughout my life.

This gets all mentioned because John Dies at the End does what so many other mediums have failed to do and produced writing and mental images that have genuinely unnerved me… There’s a scene in particular toward the end of the book where David is at his home in the dark and wakes up to the TV being turned on by itself, with only the image a man staring back at him accompanying it. Am I explaining it the best? Probably not. But Pargin is an expert at seeding those little breadcrumbs throughout the narrative addressing the uncanny and the horrifying; A little gore throughout these pages goes a long way.

These horror elements arguably become more front and centre as we progress through acts two and three, and the juxtaposition between the absolute absurdity of some of these scenarios and the mundanity of life afterward, combined with the aforementioned horror/comedy all come together to produce something that I believe with utmost certainty can be called… A ‘cult hit’.

One would think for a book that pushes the pendulum into the extreme almost every which way imaginable would be an inconsistent mess full of tonal whiplash and unearned character beats, but the book truly does have its cake and eats it too because Pargin just about nails every single moment it goes for, sometimes with frighteningly accurate real life detail.

John Dies at the End is an absolute must read for anyone who is a fan of cosmic horror stories and/or bonkers plot driven narratives full of mend bending laughs. It’s a little clunky and slow in places, but the admission price is worth the book and then a lot more. Plus, this book is worth reading just for the first exchange between David, John, and Korrok alone. Top notch stuff.

Mitchell Porteous (Gladstone Chapter)