Friday 14 February 2014

This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously Dude, don't touch it)

It's rare that I start a book review worrying about how to write the title. It doesn't have a colon, but neither does it have brackets, but it seems wrong not to parenthesise at all. I also worry about the title of the film adaptation - if any - because most of the available options are slightly confusing.

About a year after thwarting an interdimensional plot to destroy the world, David and John are back to their old lives. They work dead-end jobs, John runs a website devoted to the weird, people with strange problems misguidedly come to them for help, and David continues a middle-distance relationship with his girlfriend Amy. Sometimes, very strange things happen to them, like the largely invisible, spider-like monster that bites David in the leg, possesses a cop and ends up sparking off an outbreak which threatens all human life and is mostly John and David's fault.

The sequel to John Dies at the End is a more coherent narrative, but retains the same mix of cosmic horror, conspiracy, fourth wall busting metafiction and crude, stoner humour that marked out the earlier book. David Wong - the author, rather than his pseudonymous alter-ego - mixes up the narrative a little more, adding several sections from Amy's sober, slightly Pollyanna perspective, alongside David the character's primary narration and the bits in which John, bereft of other witnesses, is purely awesome. There's even a chapter told from the PoV of Molly the dog.

It is, when you get right down to it, a poorly-written mess of a book, as spectacularly recreated by someone who is actually a pretty impressive writer. Every coarse joke, every cliche, every section of mangled, self-aggrandising or self-pitying prose is actually something that has been artfully and knowingly crafted as part of a novel that is by turns disturbing and hilarious; and often both at the same time.

A word of warning: I don't like spiders, but was able to cling to an early description of the creatures not really being spiders. Your mileage may vary, so if you're a big arachnophobe then seriously dude, don't touch it.

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