What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror

Ending kinda sucked rest was good, comes with my favourite quote: “If you want my sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary: between sh*t and syphilis.”

Good, but every book in this series gets weaker and weaker.

A whirlwind of an adventure confined within a handful of locations.

Persuasive beasties
depression, or monster kids
both eat you alive.

David Wong can definitely write a fun story. It always keeps me going one more chapter one more chapter then it's midnight and I should have been in bed.

As funny and fun as “John Dies at the End”. Books like this are made for me. Someone described them as “Nonchalant Absurdism” and that just about nails it. I smiled and/or laughed the entire time.

This may be the strongest book in the John Dies at the End series - it retains the delicate balance of goofy humor, existential dread, and grotesque horror, but it hangs together better as a coherent arc, where its predecessors sometimes rambled with less direction.

Wong/Pargin does a great job of setting up a truly disturbing scene, or poignantly addressing depression and its impact on loved ones . . . and then having John barrel through doing something insouciant, egotistical, and ridiculous. It doesn't undo the more serious themes, it just makes them easier to handle. And provides a good portion of laugh-out-loud moments, which is a worthwhile endeavor all on its own.

And blessings on the author for his afterword, addressing the fans who have contacted him about their real-life encounters with monsters - he kindly exhorts these folks to seek medical help, reassuring them both that his work is 100% fiction, and that seeing visions like this is not uncommon, but is very treatable. You wouldn't necessarily expect important and compassionate reflections on mental illness in a book that deals so much with silicone sex butts, but this novel really delivers on both.