Synopsis
Like a resilient zombie, David Wong's debut novel keeps reappearing, and it seems to gain strength with every resurrection. Originally published online in serial form, JOHN DIES AT THE END stirred up a word-of-mouth tidal wave, and eventually found its way into print from tiny Permuted Press, which specializes in apocalyptic zombie thrillers. Readers soon began devouring copies of the book like the undead at a brain banquet, until it finally caught the attention of the major publishers. In this extravaganza of hallucinatory mayhem, a video store clerk (Wong) and his pal (John) try to determine whether the grotesque creatures they keep encountering are harbingers of the apocalypse or leftover delirium from a dose of high-powered drugs they each ingested. Either way, the pickled pair of protagonists see no reason to deviate from their standard practice of guzzling buckets of beer and trying to top each other's penis jokes in this splattered fix of gore and giggles.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2009-09-29 |
| Size | | Length: | 375 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 22.1 oz |
Publisher's Note
A full-length tale based on the cult online serial by the editor-in-chief of Cracked.com finds an increasing number of people changed into threatening inhuman creatures by a hallucinogen, a situation that places the fate of the world in the hands of a pair of anti-heroes. 50,000 first printing.
Industry Reviews
"Wong...adroitly spoofs the horror genre while simultaneously offering up a genuinely horrifying story....Sure to please the Fangoria set while appealing to a wider audience, the book's smart take on fear manages to tap into readers' existential dread on one page, then have them laughing the next."
(07/13/2009)
"Wong's debut is creepy, snide, gross, morbidly dark and full of lots of gratuitous weirdness for weirdness' sake, not to mention penis jokes. So why is it so funny? Perhaps it's the author's well-tuned eye for the absurd, which gives his tale a compelling-against-all-odds, locker-room-humor-meets-Douglas-Adams vibe. The characters are also unexpectedly sharp, rarely the kind of two-dimensional cutouts frequently found in genre fiction."
(09/01/2009)
"[JOHN DIES AT THE END] is the rare genre novel that manages to keep its sense of humor strong without ever diminishing the scares; David is a consistently hilarious narrator whose one-liners and running commentary are sincere in a way that makes the horrors he confronts even more unsettling....Wong manages to pull everything together for a finale that's both stomach-churningly freaky and oddly moving. It's the sort of thing that leaves readers breathless and nauseous, but surprisingly hungry for more."
(10/22/2009)
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