Review Round-Up: David Wong's JOHN DIES AT THE END

Zack Handlen reviewed David Wong's John Dies At The End for The Onion's AV Club.  Here's a taste, you'll have to click through for more.

JDATE 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. Plot-wise, for a good two-thirds of the book, it seems like Wong is more interested in piling on weirder and weirder threats than fitting the pieces together, and while his invention never flags, the accumulation of horrors eventually threatens to turn the narrative into a breathless series of “And then?”s. Still, the tone and white-knuckle pacing cover up a lot of sins, and 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.

At Kirkus, the nameless literati write:

Originally offered online in serial form, 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. 

And it turns out there was a book trailer!




JOHN DIES AT THE END screening times:
Sat., Sept. 15, 11:59pm: RYERSON
Sun., Sept. 16, 5pm: CINEPLEX YONGE & DUNDAS 2