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

by David Wong

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

Holy crap, there is no mood-changing substance on Earth like testosterone.

I convinced myself with every passing peaceful moment that things were getting better, that the worst was over. In that, I was pants-shittingly wrong.

You can’t diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can’t see your own eyeball.

If you think time stops in the waiting room at the dentist, you ain’t never been alone in an interrogation room at a police station.

That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That’s what makes a person a dumbass, folks.

There’s no magic, Mr. Wong. Just knowing tricks the other guy doesn’t know about.”

PEOPLE DIE. This is the fact the world desperately hides from us from birth. Long after you find out the truth about sex and Santa Claus, this other myth endures, this one about how you’ll always get rescued at the last second and if not, your death will at least mean something and there’ll be somebody there to hold your hand and cry over you. All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you’ll die, and you’ll probably be alone.

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.

“Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.” “Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”

Guys like him, the ones who grip the Bible so tight they leave fingernail grooves, they’re the ones who are the most scared of their dark side. Always going too far the other way, fighting for the Lord, often just because it gives them an excuse to fight.

We had our plan. Or, considering that the plan had come from me, we had given up and were waiting to die.

I wondered if they noticed Morgan didn’t exactly read Justin his rights before blowing a hole in him. I mean, I did the same thing but that’s why society doesn’t let me carry a badge.

“Guys, let’s not make this a dick-measuring contest, okay?” There was silence for a moment, then John said, “That’s good, because it wouldn’t be no contest at all.” Silence again. “That is, I’m referring to my cock being bigger than either of yours.”

“Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.”

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.”

“Son, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”

“I am a retired priest. Did you know that?” John asked, “Are you one of those priests who can shoot lasers out of their eyes? Because that would be really helpful right now.”

(if you think it’s weird getting a bratwurst from a McDonald’s, then you’re not from the Midwest).

You’d think the fact that other people could witness the weirdness would have comforted me. It didn’t. It meant the rules had changed already.

Hey, did you know that the number-one all-time rated show in Korea was the premiere of that ’80s show Joanie Loves Chachi? It turns out that in Korean, ‘chachi’ means ‘penis.’”

“Anybody want to go to Denny’s? Maybe this thing will sort itself out.”

I suddenly had an idea for this girl that would win my dick the Nobel Prize.

Video conferencing across time. Man I need pie, and fast.

There were, apparently, parties who had a very good reason to keep eyes on me at this point, aside from my perfectly-sculpted Statue-of-David buttocks.

You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.”

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

The first, third and fourth Harry Potter novels. Jim must have figured three was the most he could allow without risking turning Amy to witchcraft.

They used to build these old houses with doors that just led to a big drop, to fool burglars. They’d label that door TREASURY or something like that. The guy busts through the door and finds himself falling straight down. They’d put spikes or something down there. They used to call it an ‘Irish Elevator.’”

“There’s a body in my toolshed.” “Is it Jeff Wolflake? Does that mean the manager job is open?”

I COULDN’T HAVE known at the time, right? That maybe all of our answers were there, in Jim’s stuff? That maybe he had pieced the whole thing together?

my science teacher says if all of the worms in the world came up to the surface the world would be buried 20 feet deep in them

As much as I hate being right, I hate it even more when John is right.

“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.”

Do you believe in ghosts and angels and demons and devils and gods, all that?” “Sure.” “Okay. So, if they exist, then to them we’d be like bacteria or viruses, right? Like way lower on the ladder. Now the trick is that a higher being can study and understand the things under it, but not vice versa. We put the virus under the microscope. A virus can’t do the same to us. So if there are things that exist above us humans, beings so radically different and big and complex that they can’t fit inside your brain, we’d be no more equipped to see them than the germs are equipped to see us. Right?”

On Judgment Day, I’d be able to proudly state that when I thought the hordes of Hell were coming for a local girl, I stood ready to shoot at them with a small-caliber pistol.

“Are you scared?” “Pretty much all the time, yeah.” “Why? Because of what happened in Las Vegas?” “Because I sort of looked into Hell, but I still don’t know if there’s a Heaven or not.”

“They can’t get us! They can’t get us in the light! I knew it!” “How did you—” “David,” she said, rolling her eyes, “they’re shadow people.”

The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them. You heard me.

“Why don’t we just go? To another town, or state, or Canada. When’s the last time you’ve heard of somebody exploding in Canada?”

“Why do you, like, hate yourself?” “If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?” “Well, that’s just stupid.”

“VERY SIMPLY,” I said to Amy, “the reason we can see things that you can’t is right there in that bottle. We don’t know where it came from or what exactly it does. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that’s not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden. It’d be like if a doctor could walk around with microscopes strapped to his eyes all of the time, so he could just look and see the sickness crawling around inside us.”

SOCIETY IS DOOMED for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down. John

If we were going to wind up in the belly of Korrok, might as well see if we could make him choke on the way down.

“Wouldn’t it make it harder to do evil if they had to carry around a mark?” John shrugged. “Once they’re barefoot and kicking you, it’s already too late. Follow me.”

No matter where you go, management is always a bunch of cheap bastards.

And as for what they’re doing out there, well, they’re doing the same thing all thinking creatures do, from the moment they come to life. Trying to change the world as they see fit.”

“I wonder what they’re expecting. Are we supposed to fight each other to the death?” “In Eyes Wide Shut world, we’ll be lucky if that’s all it is.”

“It is considered a greater crime, though, to unleash killer spiders on an unarmed crowd. We call that ‘arachnicide.’”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked John. “That if Franz Kafka were here his head would explode?” “Actually, yeah.”