This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It
Wong—in reality Cracked.com writer Jason Pargin—follows up his comic horror novel John Dies at the End (2009) with this wildly out-there sequel. Best friends John and Dave live in a smallish town that seems to suffer from a surfeit of supernatural and suspicious events. The story begins with a local cop being, um, intruded upon by a spiderish creature that turns its victim into, um, a zombie-like individual, and it gets a whole lot weirder from there. Wong, the book’s first-person narrator and also one of its central characters (John being “John Cheese,” a fellow Cracked.com contributor) focuses mainly on the laughs and the strange goings-on, but there’s a very interesting idea here: What if the current pop-culture zombie mania could lead to a pseudo-zombie apocalypse? What if, in other words, enough people believe in something to turn it into reality? And how do a couple of slacker dudes defeat a creature that, technically, doesn’t even exist? Full of laughs and goofiness, the book should definitely appeal to fans of John Dies at the End and to readers of comic horror fiction in general (especially, it should be noted, fans of British novelist Tom Holt, who will be familiar with the same sort of whimsy and ordinary-guy-in-extraordinary-situation environment.) --David Pitt