John Dies at the End (John Dies at the End, #1)

by David Wong

If it contains helpful lessons to improve your life, I sure as fuck missed them, and I was there.

The phrase “sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist” suddenly flew through my mind.

I was disappointed to find Hell had a cheap tiled ceiling, some browned with water damage.

Most people don’t realize it until they’re laying facedown on the pavement somewhere, gasping for their last breath. Only then do they realize that life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it’s out. Forever.

“Fuck all of you,” John retorted. “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”

A slow smile spread over John’s face. He turned to me and said the five most horrifying words he knows. “Dave, I have a plan.”

He had a brown leather couch, a matching armchair. He had a big-screen plasma TV sitting in the middle of the room; hooked to it were four video game systems, with game boxes littering the floor. A fairly nice DVD player, a one-hundred-disk CD changer in an entertainment center. “John, are we crack dealers now?”

Now I’m real sorry you saw what you saw but we ain’t got time for you to curl up into some psychological shell. Help us and you can just repress the memory later.”

“Ma’am,” I said, “if your dog was dabbling in the occult while you had her it’s best you tell us now. We’re experts.”

The [Undisclosed] football team has been raped in the ass by fate once again, booted from the first round of the playoffs as they failed to carry their inflatable turd past a chalk line in the grass as often as their opponents did.

It’s weird. And I mean ‘bad’ weird, not ‘clown’ weird.

I disconnected and did what I usually do after hanging up with John: sat in dumbfounded silence and contemplated all of the poor choices in my life.

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.

I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and the group Limp Bizkit—Shitload’s favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy metal guitar.

I suppose she had a reasonable fear of two creepy males clicking through shots of her dressing and doing the things girls do alone in their bedrooms. Lighting farts or whatever.

“Oh, and don’t even get me started on her, John.” I tossed the prints aside. “I mean, did you notice that she’s not even retarded?” Silence from John’s end, then, “Was she supposed to come back retarded?”

“And watch out for Molly. See if she does anything unusual. There’s something I don’t trust about the way she exploded and then came back from the dead like that.”

I thought about telling her my own tragic story of the scrotal candle-wax incident, but figured it wouldn’t impress her.

I don’t know if I’m up for this. I feel stretched out, like too little butter scraped over too much waffle. And then it all falls down into one of the waffle holes and there’s none left for the rest of the waffle and you sort of have to tilt it to make it run out.”