Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon: A Guided Tour of the Internet's Strange Subcultures and Weird Realities

by Zack Parsons

Finally, a book about the Internet that takes place outside the Internet! Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon leaves the bleeps and bloops behind for a series of surreal interviews and adventures with the people behind the computer screen.
Something Awful's Zack Parsons risks life and sanity by meeting with people who believe they are real dragons and elves, attending a furry convention in costume, paying a visit to a white power group in Texas, talking shop with people who want to be swallowed whole, and witnessing the launching of the Ron Paul Blimp. More than a year in the making, this epic adventure is full to bursting with the jokes about wieners and poopy that made Something Awful a true Internet sensation. Have you added the book to your cart yet or do you just hate yourself that much?

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor, Comedy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Zack Parsons is a Chicago area writer known for his acerbic commentary and bleakly humorous science fiction. He has authored two non-fiction books, MY TANK IS FIGHT! and YOUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR IS A DRAGON. His works, including That Insidious Beast and CONEX: Convict Connections, have appeared online and in various published anthologies including A COMMONPLACE BOOK OF THE WEIRD: THE UNTOLD STORIES OF H.P. LOVECRAFT and OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS: DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS.

His debut novel, LIMINAL STATES, will be released in April of 2012.

Reviews

[Vladimir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun book about internet weirdos.

I can somehow relate to half of the weirdo groups described there (Ron Paul supporters, healthy eaters, self-diagnosed Aspergers), but oh well.

"...you can insulate yourself among like-minded freaks until you're convinced that you're normal and everyone else is just unfairly persecuting you, denying your God-given right to identify as an anime Nazi dragon."

" "Are you a part of the plot?" he asked. "Who are your conspirators? What are you hiding your cameras from, Mr. Parsons?"
"The furries", I replied. "They hate us."
"The furries," Lou repeated bitterly. "Those motherfuckers." "

- it's that kind of a book. Perfect reading when you're on medication, sleeping 15 hours a day and feel dizzy the other 9 hours.

Also, I stumbled upon this book in one of Avva's "What are you currently reading?" posts - in a comment by Pavel Zavyalov, aka my childhood hero Х.Мотолог, so I didn't have much choice but to read it.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is astonishingly bad.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, I’m not going to be ashamed to say that I spent quite a bit of time on the internet. The internet is interesting . There’s a whole world of knowledge and videos and interaction that could not have existed before the advent on the web. Miss a TV show? No worries, it’s on the internet! Need to do some heavy-duty research for a paper? Holy crap, here’s JSTOR! Need to look some up some quick information to settle a bet? Bam, Wikipedia! It’s a glorious thing and I’m thankful that I spent my childhood without it so that I could properly appreciate it now.

But, as every sun casts a shadow, so does the internet. Guys, the internet is weird . Thanks to the most casual of web surfing, I know what degloving is. I’ve been goatse’d more times than I can count. I’ve seen a lady break wind into a cake. I’ve been disturbed and sickened by these series of tubes, and yet, I can’t stay away. It’s an illness.

Still, I know that there are many sunshiney people out there, unjaded by repeated surprise viewings of the inner workings of a man’s colon, who are going to cheerfully jump on the internet and be summarily crushed. That’s where Zack Parsons’s Your Next Door Neighbor is a Dragon comes in. Parsons ventures where none of us truly wish to go, seeking out those who allow their freak flags to fly in the anonymity of the web. He interviews furries, voraphiles, fanfiction writers, Ron Paul fans, and so many more, creating a short encyclopedia of common internet denizens. His interviews are held together with what I hope is a fictional road trip narrative, replete with cult kidnappings and obnoxious literary agents.

Parsons isn’t a journalist, nor does he claim to be. A brief exploration of his normal writing gig, Something Awful, shows a site that usually displays a decidedly negative view of the people interviewed in this book. Parsons, however, does cast a sympathetic eye on many of his subjects, who are even more absurd in the bright light of day than they are as ones and zeros in a world-wide community. It reminded me of Jon Ronson’s Them (which I’ve plugged more than once) in that it showed the real person behind the mask.

This isn’t a book that you use to write a research paper on the sociology of the internet, but it gives the reader a good idea of what lurks beneath the web’s glossy surface. Parsons subjects himself to it so you don’t have to. Be grateful.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

The internet is a wonderful source of information and communication, but it cuts both ways. It is also a wonderful source of misinformation and a way for the ostracized (rightfully or not) to congregate. This is a fictional introduction to many faces behind much of the weirdness one is likely to find on the net after only a modicum of searching. I was promised the section on otherkin to be hilarious and it did indeed deliver. The section on furries was disturbingly funny as well.

Still, a couple of issues. The ending was one that had my hands itching for a machete as well (if you'd read it, you'd understand). Also, there are some medical situations right from the beginning that are described graphically enough that they should come with a trigger warning.

[Abdulla · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm trying to remember why I bought this book.
I didn't get the humor in it at all; I ended up feeling disgusted, repulsed, and rolling my eyes most of the time.
It was a very, very, very tedious read.
I was expecting actual content rather than this weird story.

[Saraquael · Rating 2 out of 5]

The best part of the book was the foreword, which he didn't write.

[Phillip Jacobi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm thanked in this book by the author. Hooray!

[Kit · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 65%, then changed my mind and had to try again.
++++++++++
IS this book the equivalent of eating Chex Mix, only you don't just pick out the pretzels and move on?
Hmm.
Maybe it's more like you open a bag labeled Chex Mix, only to find it is made predominantly of Cheeto dust. When you open the bag, it explodes all over you, and you sift through the bottom for a completely different product with occupies only about 30% of the actual size of the bag you bought, and a tad stale. You're not only unsatisfied, you're a little pissed off that you decided to buy them at all, then you're even more angry that you didn't get what was advertised, and then you're kind of frustrated because you have to put your jacket back on and head to the gas station down the street for something that does satisfy and you aren't sure it's all that worth it for junk in the first place. As you go to throw the bag away, it turns out there are actually about four or five rice Chex pieces in it. The fact doesn't comfort you.

That being said, this book is almost a decade old and about the internet, so it is bound to have some degree of staleness for that reason alone. The author has acknowledged as much, so I have to give him credit for that.

I really think I was expecting a fun book on internet subcultures and the general weirdness of that rather than like three paragraphs at a time per subject and then mining through a lot of unfunny Gen-X tryhard humor that feels like being stuck in a group project with the class weirdo who is too oblivious to understand that the real reason everyone avoids them is their complete and utter lack of regard for social cues and/or interest in anyone around him and, to make it worse, just discovered Hunter S Thompson and thinks their own appeal is defined by Taking The Pill and Seeing What Others Don't. We all know that kid who is some awful combination of know-it-all, wannabe anime hero, edgelord, and self-important basement dweller who earnestly believes they are superior to others around them due to their Dorito-fueled intellect, but somehow can't get that when nobody is laughing, it might mean you aren't as funny as you think you are.
The attempts at semi-true reportage with "humor" injected fall pretty flat once you've aged beyond 14 and I seriously don't get how this book could have been so off the mark from my usual taste for weird internet stuff, freaky folks, and the sociology of the internet. Hell, I used to spend a fair amount of time on forums like SomethingAwful, going to cons, etc, so it isn't like this is a type I'm unfamiliar with. That said, it's staggering that the author still can't seem to stay on topic long enough to keep with a very interesting subject and be humorous at the same time.
Yiiiiiiiiiikes.

[Ash Schulz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reminds me of the Something Awful that existed before 2005 (i.e still funny). It's not only hilarious, but also surprisingly well written. It does at times flip back and forth between an obviously fictional story about the author and then to his actual interviews, but I don't think this means that the author was confused about what he did and didn't want this book to be about. In short, it's just ridiculous. It isn't supposed to be interpreted as something deeper than it actually is. This is just good ol' fashion trashy internet humor.

I thought that I had already spent all of my laughter over poking fun at furries, otherkin, slash fiction writers and other rejects of the internet long ago in high school. This book proved me wrong.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is 100% entertaining and does a pretty good job of exploring some of the wackier internet subcultures. The basic structure of the book starts with a (clearly) fictional story about the process of writing the book, then actual interviews with weird internet people, then back to the wacky pretend story about writing the book again. Both the real interviews and the fake story are amusing, but the mish-mashing of real life with fiction made it hard, sometimes, to know what was real and what wasn't. This isn't necessarily bad, but I would have liked to know at what point the absurdity exited the real world and entered into creative writing land.

Still, I liked the book and had a good time reading it.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's not really a great deal to be said about this.

The first 10% or so was very funny, but from there it was a really strange downhill ramble with a meandering P.O.V and a bunch of quasi-real anecdotes up to a completely unsatisfying ending.

I get the feeling he was trying to put The Internet in a book with all it entails, but doing so and failing because that's the point still feels an awful lot like failing. And after reading his Con-ex and Instruction for a... serials (as well as being a huge fan of the Fashion SWAT articles) I had reasonably high expectations when I picked this up. I'll no doubt still get around to Liminal States and by no means was the book a dreadful bore, or badly written, it just wasn't nearly as much as it could have been.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Considering the Author's reputation being linked with Something Awful, I expected something a bit more. At times it seemed like he couldn't decide if the book was a humorous "informational" book or his own little story about himself (either true or not). For instance, the chapter about some weird female friend he had has nothing to do with internet freaks that I could think of. Maybe if he went one way or the other (humorous factoid book OR freakishly autobiographical), this book could have really shone as an entertaining piece.

[Clayton Reese · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, best described, is a trip into but a scant few of the Internet's shadier corners, weirdo clubs and bizarre people, and the real people behind the HTML and usernames.

Zack Parsons has a narrative that is interestingly part-truth and part-bullshit, in a gonzo style. From waddling and ineffectually trying to fend off fursuiters at AnthroCon to constant allusions to a "Super Bible", the entire thing reads like an abnormally weird 80'd movie novelization but set in our own modern era.

All in all, an enjoyable and bizarre read, but the style and story may be reviled by some.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure really how to categorize this book. It was an entertaining read about the some of the odder subcultures the internet has allowed to grow (most of them I think were around before the internet, but the digital world has allowed the communities to foster growth, and expand their influence). It fits in a bit with my first graduate level class - information communities - as the communities Parsons delves into could all have been the topic of my research for this past semester - weird research, but still.

[Darby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book in about four hours, it's definitely a quick read. It sort of spirals off into a semi-biographical storyline near the end that doesn't have much to do with the original idea, but it was hilarious regardless. However, I was a lot more interested in the interviews with the real-life weirdos that are around us.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I was a little disappointed, but only because my standards were raised so high by Zack's incredible work at Something Awful. He's one of my favorite writers there, so I expected to be laughing non-stop, but that's really impossible in a book. Still, it was very funny, if the story itself got a little old by the end.

[Chase Stockstill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dreadfully inadequate. The attempt at gonzo journalism comes across as entirely insincere and the only chapter that really delivers is the one on Vore. Would not recommend to anyone looking to get an in depth view into the strange minds being made public by this generation's easy to nab omnipotence.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely hilarious; even better than I thought it'd be. Zach Parsons, of Something Awful fame, inserts (supposed) interviews with a variety of strange people belonging to subcultures that are spread via the internet into a strange and funny story starring himself. It's rare that a book makes me laugh out loud so often.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be mandatory reading for kids before they're issued their internet licenses. If just one child can be frightened away from dressing as a cuttlefish and going to a convention, then Zack has done his part.

[H · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was funny, but I would have preferred a more thorough exploration of weird internet subcultures than just a bunch of wacky/fake adventures with tiny interviews interspersed. Props to the book for stringing me along for at least a third of its length before I realised the narrative was fictional.

[Andrew Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a little disappointing. I was really expecting a deeper exploration of Internet subcultures, and instead I got a strange, Hunter Thompson-wannabe narrative. It does have its moments, but it was just not what I was expecting at all.

[Jason Rizos]

Wacky, pop-culture laden, humor. Looks good so far.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, simple book - an afternoon's breeze-read, this book "explores" some of the more interesting internet subcultures in a *very* informal, quasi-fictional way.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was pretty disappointed with this book. While I enjoyed the author´s previous work, this one seemed a little self-indulgent. Far more fantasy than actual content.

Skip it.

[Kyle Hajek · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent series of anecdotes and interviews with some of the weirdest people the internet (and therefore the world) has to offer.

[Ziegler Aqua vitae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny. Epicly good at transitioning through the different subjects and genres. Continuously builds upon itself to create a mountain of towering insanity.

[C M · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit entertaining and funny, but that's really about it. Made me a bit nostalgic for the glory days of Something Awful.

[Samuel Guglielmo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun book of Zack Parsons interviewing strange people. Sometimes tough to tell which parts are real or fake, but overall is pretty entertaining still.