This Book Review Is Full Of Spiders

Anyone fortunate enough to not heed the warning subhead on This Book Is Full Of Spiders by David Wong (a.k.a. Jason Pargin) is in for a wild ride and maybe a sleepless night. The subhead — Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It — ought to be dismissed outright even if the author (or this reviewer) will not accept any responsibility whatsoever for whatever may or may not happen to you in the minutes immediately following.

Suffice to say that the comically-inclined para-unnormal slacker Wong is back, but he isn't back with the same unsteady hand that penned a web serial-turned-book or writes for Cracked. No, not this time.

Freed from the constraints of the daily grind after the film rights to his first book sold, Pargin proves he is not the same stream-of-conscious short-content author. There is much more to his second novel than sophomoric humor, sarcastic cliches, and silly imagination (even if there is plenty of that too).

This Book Is Full Of Spiders will spin your head around inside out.

Although the framework of the plot is nothing overtly uncommon — a semi-relunctant protagonist is pitted against a sinister force and must save the world by overcoming insurmountable odds in a small and boring town that nobody ever heard of — everything about the story is as fresh and grisly as sausage making. Even the once apathetic Wong steps up. He's still a slacker, but takes his abilities seriously.

The best of Pargin remains intact. This Book Is Full Of Spiders has its fair share of meat, poop, naked people, and penis jokes. But what it mostly doesn't have are the overt editorial interjections that sometimes disrupted the first book, as funny as they could be. By removing tangents, Pargin's second book leaves more room for reader intuition, imagination and, well, equally unhealthy obsessions with insects (or arachnids in this case).

As alluded to in the trailer, Wong finds himself besieged by spiders almost immediately. Except, they aren't spiders exactly. Wong gives a better account in the book. Spider only becomes the operative word because there is nothing else like them on the planet. Besides, how they look is less important than what they do.


These spiders, which are keenly interested in Wong until an unfortunate officer responding to a neighborhood disturbance becomes a better target, are parasitic puppet masters. They either eat you, breed in you, or turn you into a shambling and sometimes augmented sack of deadly meat that bears a striking resemblance to zombies. (Sometimes they do a little of all three. It's all very random.)

Most people don't even know it's happening until it's too late. As other-dimensional creatures, nobody can see them except Wong and his best friend John Cheese. They can see them because of their past affliction and minor addiction to a substance better known as "Soy Sauce." (The really good stuff.)

Soy Sauce, among other properties and side effects, gives anyone who survives it the ability to see dead people or, in this case, parasitic puppet master insects that look a little bit like lobsters but mostly act like possession-bent skull spiders. Being able to see them has advantages and disadvantages, especially when most of the world thinks you skipped too many sessions with your court-ordered therapist.

Unfortunately for Wong, his house is ground zero for what is quickly recognized by anyone seeing a breaking news segment as a real-life zombie apocalypse (even if it isn't). This is patently perfect because the similarities give Wong enough breathing room to weave in pointed observations about the current pop culture fascination with zombies but without any trappings or limitations.

It's a brilliant little split, especially because most of the world is treating the pandemic like a zombie apocalypse, even if Wong and Cheese (and later Wong's girlfriend and a few others) know better. The pathogen isn't a contagion. It's puppet time, brought on by hundreds and thousands of big and little spiders doing what they do as part of an even deeper plot to put humanity through a wood chipper.

Is there a right and a Wong way for this author?

Some people who bounced along with Wong in the always unpredictable John Does At The End will be a bit miffed by the more linear trajectory of This Book Is Full Of Spiders. For them, the entertaining and often thoughtless absurdity of it all made for a good time.

This Book Is Full Of Spiders retains much of the humor (although sometimes more subtle) but without any of the sloppiness. (A few people even called the back two-thirds of the book 'serious.') Serious is a strong word for the world of Wong. He is more mature as an author and the writing is polished, but there are still plenty of surprises and laugh-out-loud moments in his new comedic horror. It's a fair trade because Pargin proves he can master the craft.

This Book Is Full Of Spiders Bites 8.2 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale.

Although people who read this book first won't have the full benefit of the unadulterated background of Soy Sauce, This Books Is Full Of Spiders can easily stand alone on all eight or so legs. It's easily one of the funnest books published this year, showing another side of Pargin and giving others a better introduction if they like tighter writing. Otherwise, John Dies At The End is the less structured gateway to a world unlike any other.

Either way, Wong is an addictive presence. And in this book, he gives more space to Cheese, Amy Sullivan, and newcomer Lance Falconer. This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It is out on Amazon and can be found at Barnes & Noble. The book can also be downloaded for iBooks or as an audiobook. Narrator Nick Podehl is a perfect David Wong, but also does a splendid job as other characters. It's a must read for anyone who appreciates comedic horror with a tinge of insect exploitation.

John Dies At The End Is All Wong

If any book ever deserved to have a warning label, it would be John Dies At The End by David Wong (a.k.a. Jason Pargin). The label wouldn't be fancy, something more generic like a "Hello My Name Is ..." sticker scratched out with blue ink and then renamed with a black Sharpie: "Results May Vary" by David Wong.

Results do vary. Some people know people who have been committed after reading it. Others claim the book cooks them breakfast and makes their coffee in the morning. Some people find it remarkably infectious. Others are compulsively obsessive in trying to return it, electronic editions included. Some people say it's so wet that it needs leak-proof binding. Others call it dry enough to spontaneously combust.

And if all these varied responses to the cult book seem suspiciously pointing toward the same conclusion, you're right. It's probably irresponsible to even review it. This book brings out the odd in everyone. You've been warned.

John Dies At The End is an imbalanced and bumpy romp of sloppy nonsense. 

What Wong wrote might be pressed between two covers, but it's obvious it began as a web serial, written in near real time by a guy who would eventually become a senior editor for Cracked. The entire story is too irregular to have ever been crafted by a writer (even when it was edited for print). Instead, it smacks of being furiously banged in short bursts, the author not always knowing where it might go.

And that is what it is: an exercise in stream-of-conscious short-content writing woven together by a paranormal theme-of-the-week flash that spanned five years to write. That, and there is the common but inconsistent insistence of dropping in unrelated random bits and one-liners that make it preposterous and sophomoric with alarming length. Oddly enough, it is both annoying and likable at the same time.

It's not unlike the film trailer for the Don Coscarelli screen treatment due out next year. The potential for it to be disastrously compelling or compellingly disastrous is present in every frame, even if the movie is tighter than the tome. It also has Paul Giamatti playing Arnie, a skeptical journalist who investigates paranormal affairs and, in this case, protagonist David Wong's undeniably weird and absurd stories.



The story of two friends who aren't named David Wong and John Cheese.

The bizarre collection of three major episodes are kicked off when the principal protagonist and author surrogate David Wong meets a Jamaican drug dealer enticing select people to take a paranormal psychoactive called "Soy Sauce." The drug is hardly passive. It wiggles, jiggles, and gets inside people.

The sauce is what makes Wong a less than a reliable storyteller. Wong says as much, in between his bouts of cynicism, slacker sarcasm, and self-corrections. He doesn't know what's real, some of the time.

The sauce also makes Wong wonky, endowing him with extra sensory perception, clairvoyance, and a keen ability to experience the mundane, like parallel worlds, time travel, ghosts, demons, and hell. Yeah, Soy Sauce is the good stuff. The only downsides are the side effects.

But to get to any of that, you have to wade past the prologue that gives you a taste of the book and not the best of it. The real story revolves around an evil that is attempting to move into and devour the world or at least own it.

The first time this evil attempts to infect people with large concentrations of the sauce in order to turn them into a mass of flailing, dismembered bodies capable of opening a doorway of nothingness inside the Luxor Hotel, Las Vegas. The second attempt is to worm its way into the world through the possession of a sportscaster. And lastly, it attempts to take advantage of Wong's apathetic reluctance to save the world and swap people for puppets.

The rest of it is strung together by the author's obsession with insects (little ones and big ones), meat, poop, naked people, penis jokes, and abrupt interjections by the author because he can't help himself. Sometimes, the absurdity of it all is funny. Sometimes it feels more like Wong finds it funny and is trying to convince you it's humorous too.

John Dies At The End Punches Up 4.2 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale. 

There are large sections of the book that chug along uninterrupted and are deserving of a higher score, when Wong writes better than his potential as opposed to overwriting for an over-the-top effect. But then again, this book isn't literature as much as it is entertaining, thoughtless pleasure, like a celebrity reality show or circus side show might.

There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, this was what Wong was shooting for all along, even when he started writing the story online. His original plan was to write something that would help people forget their troubles for an hour or two. It's one guy's mash up of everyone he's been compared to without ever reaching their level of proficiency or prowess, making it neither comedy nor horror but a fantastical farce with forced commentary that will sometimes make you chuckle, sigh, and say "ew."

John Dies At The End by David Wong is available from Barnes & Noble. You can find it on Amazon or download the book from iBooks. There is also an audiobook on iTunes, read by Stephen R. Throne. It's almost uncanny how he sounds like David Wong and makes for a great narrator on what can be called a wild, silly, and sometimes grotesque ride.