If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

My life these last thirteen days has been a chain of distractions, like continual gasps for air above the surface of that terrible, waiting stillness.

There was an intimacy hole these people were trying to fill, a fierce and acute desire that I found every bit as creepy as the thing made of human tongues. Still, money is money.

At the level of poverty where we exist—not starving but hopelessly locked out of the middle class—it feels like flying over an active volcano on the back of a winged creature that is friendly but also very drunk. America is, after all, full of dirt-cheap comforts. My T-shirts are five bucks at Walmart. The most amazing fast food costs less than what you’d pay to make it yourself. A good coffeemaker will beat anything you get in a fancy café. Cheap alcohol gets you drunk faster than the expensive stuff. So you can chill in a lawn chair on a nice autumn day with a beverage in your hand and say, “This isn’t so bad.” But if one of us gets a toothache or breaks our glasses or, god forbid, both? Well, now our whole world is threatening to come apart.

“Never forget, David, that devils have soft hands.

“You don’t think the thought’s occurred to me? But the more I thought about it, the more it was just another empty promise. ‘End it all’? It doesn’t end anything. Everyone who loves you is sad, and the ones who hate you are happy. Just makes the situation worse. That’s the first thing you find out when you get old: all the easy exits are just fake doors painted on brick, like in those old Road Runner cartoons. Do kids still watch those?”

The devil is real, but he doesn’t turn up in a red suit with hooves. You have to imagine him as like a disease that you get—you pass it on and you don’t even know it. Educated people don’t call it the devil; they call it trauma. It rewires your brain and tries to spread itself down to the next generation and the one after that, the pain rolling down through time. The