#jason pargin

[skrytch]

Been reading Jason "David Wong" Pargin's newest book "If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe" and... Damn if this passage just ain't too real

[victusinveritas]

This has big "They China Food" (John Dies at the End) energy in the best way.

[haveyoureadthishorrorbookpoll]

Have you read...

note: If you did not finish but feel you read enough to form an opinion, you may choose a ‘Yes’ option instead of 'Partly' (e.g., Yes, I didn’t like it). Interpret "neutral or complicated" however you like, I intended this category to be a broad option between like and dislike.

John Dies at the End is a comic lovecraftian horror novel written by Jason Pargin (aka David Wong) that was first published online as a webserial beginning in 2001, then as an edited manuscript in 2004, and a printed paperback in 2007, published by Permuted Press. STOP. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands. NO, don't put it down. It's too late. They're watching you. My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye. The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me. The important thing is this: The drug is called Soy Sauce and it gives users a window into another dimension. John and I never had the chance to say no. You still do. I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind: None of this was my fault.

submit a horror book!

[jadlz]

do u see my vision

[artbyblastweave]

Reread John Dies At The End this weekend, and there’s this one bit that I think really encapsulates the whole vibe of the series. 

In the scene in Las Vegas, when they’re running from the teleporting wig monsters and the group has barricaded themselves behind a door while trying to work out a plan with Marconi, John offhandedly asks why the monsters are bothering to try and brute-force the door when they can just teleport instead. After he says this, the monsters outside stop pounding on the door and are heard murmuring amongst themselves, and the gag is that the monsters themselves didn’t even think to try that until they overheard John. This is actually a fairly boilerplate gag. I’ve seen gags along this line- the heroes accidentally reminding the monsters they’ve got an easy way in- multiple times.

Then one of the monsters immediately teleports in and kills Big Jim.

That’s not an incidental death. Over the course of the novel, Big Jim is revealed to have been one of the first people to figure out the full extent of what’s going on with Korrok’s invasion, he’s revealed to have stunning levels of insight into, and practical experience using the Soy Sauce, and his sister Amy- the last surviving member of the family following his death- is left vulnerable to exploitation by Korrok’s forces at least in part due to his absence, which forms the whole back-half of the novel. Even outside of plot relevance he’s a pretty fleshed-out figure in terms of how he relates to the community of Undisclosed and in John and Dave’s lives specifically. And now he’s dead. The one-off Scooby-doo style whacky-chase scene gag gives way to a genuinely colossal fuck-up on John’s part, a fuck-up with far-reaching implications that get brushed over in the heat of the moment because of the, you know, the incipient hell-fountain. But the innocuous gag mattered! John was careless and it bit him in the ass immediately. And all of the books are threaded through with examples of stock gags that abruptly mutate into something serious, or with heat-of-the-moment, easy-to-overlook fuckups by the protagonists that ripple forward and make the situation even harder to handle. This is such a good series

[livingfictionsystem]

John Dies at the End be like

-Sparrow

[scotio]

for some reason i prefer reading the second book in a series rather than the first because it's Soo much funnier for Jason Pargin to tell us to not read jdate in spiders and then give us little hints of what happened in jdate. I didn't read jdate first and i prefer it that way. why would i need to know the details of the soy sauce injection when David can just tell a guy "guys head exploded he was everywhere in this trailer after he injected it"

[luffysfakebeard]

god we’ve all been there

[saturn-sunshines]

it's been a while since a) I was obsessed with a book and b) I was obsessed with something relatively underground. there's hardly any fan art😭😭😭 I need somebody to draw will chasing after zoey's stupid cat

[titleknown]

Me, a teenager with what I'd later realize was severe executive dysfunction, first hearing about the marshmallow study:

(Note this is also what I thought about that godawful Harsh Truths article by Jason Pargin where he said people only care about what they can get from you, which I bear a grudge towards him for to this day)

[silelda]

It can be a little nerve-wracking to buy a book by an unfamiliar author in a genre you're not well versed in.

First line in:

It rained like we were a splatter of bird shit God was trying to hose off his deck.

I think I'm gonna love this book.

[evilphrog]

Noticing some parallels between beloved protagonists

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[werewolfbneimitzvah]

hi! sorry to bother, but you were the first (helpful) result when i googled "john dies at the end trigger warnings." do you recall if there's overdose? like, someone almost dies/does die of overdose

Oh nice, I'm glad that old list is getting some use!! So like, I'm wracking my brain and i don't think i remember that happening. The weird otherworldly drug does kill people, but not by overdose, it sorta leads them to die in other ways. When John takes the otherworldly drug at one point, Dave (who's the main first person pov guy) doesn't realize it's a supernatural situation, and i don't remember if he specifically thinks it's an OD but he does want to take John to a hospital, and John is very non-responsive for a bit (not unconscious but not replying or seeming to respond to most things). It's possible that some random person is like, mentioned as having ODed, just like casually mention someone as a throwaway thing, it wouldn't be tonally out of place, but it also is possible that doesn't happen, I'm just saying that's a possibility. I don't recall any characters who appear as characters who like talk to anyone as ODing.

This is all irt the first book, and also the movie. The second book I'm less positive on, but still don't recall an OD.

I should also warn that the tw/cw list only includes the first two books and the movie, and doesn't include anything from the third or fourth book. I did read the third book but not the fourth, and there's at least one big thing that the third book adds to the list (character implying he assaulted a child, though the narration does make it clear as the character is saying this that he's almost certainly lying with the purpose of upsetting the child's father), but it's been a while, I'm least familiar with the third book, and i did not read the fourth. The third one involves heavier use of regular degular drugs by someone, the type that can be ODed on, though he doesn't.

Oh, and there's def alcohol use, at one point in the second book a character does spend an extended period of in-universe time heavily drunk, but i don't recall him coming close to death from it.

Sorry i can't be more certain about this. I'm gonna go ahead and publish this in the tags, because i know there's a lot of people who can correct me if I'm missing something, and i very well could be, even something obvious (memory is weird & drug ODs aren't something I'm personally sensitive to so it could easily just not really register for me) so i suggest checking the notes at some point to see if anyone else has responded. Though also, if you'd rather your url not be attached to this post, shoot me another message and I'll delete this and make a separate post asking the same thing.

Hope this and any further responses are helpful!

[thelaughingspaceman]

This is the start of my posting out-of-context quotes from Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia

"He was wearing the clothes of a man headed to a funeral and the expression of a man about to cause one."

[livingfictionsystem]

"Some people would've doubted their sanity at this moment. But the part of my mind that issued those doubts had permanently melted from overuse." -John Dies at the End, by David Wong.

A fucking MOOD.

-Sparrow 🧷