I mention this largely because a distracted stream of consciousness seems the right way to review David Wong's 'comic horror' novel, John Dies at the End, which is sort of what you'd get if HP Lovecraft had done a lot of really relaxing medication and spent most of his life sitting around on the couch playing video games while August Derleth took notes and published them, only not actually like that at all.
What the book takes most of all from Lovecraft is a sense of cosmic futility. While our protagonists David and John battle monsters and gaze into the abyss with blithe disregard for standard Neitzchean safety protocols, they lack the triumphal surety of later Mythos heroes (if such a pair of words can ever be allowed). What they take from those later figures is the desire to fight instead of just fainting. To borrow a phrase from the movie I was watching yesterday - and honestly, that also feels like an appropriate thing to do in a review of this book - they are the guys who don't know what they should do, only what they can do, and choose to do it.
And the result is a lot of fun, and the kind of fun that keeps on giving. Hell, it was only looking out the image above that I came across the author's description of the book as a 'comic horror' and realised that this might be a pun on 'cosmic horror'; maybe I'm wrong, but it is apt.
I am excited to see the movie, if only to see how someone might make this book into a movie, let alone how well.
