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

by David Wong

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.

John routinely burned half a gallon of gasoline to get a pack of cigarettes. The girl bought special shampoo for her dog while Somali children starved. She warded off her guilt with a gold symbol around her neck, the intersecting strips of gold the last thing millions saw before their limbs were ripped from their bodies in medieval torture machines. Two locusts, standing before me, blazing through resources by the ton.