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

by Jason Pargin

Have you ever found yourself obsessively watching a TV show you don’t actually enjoy? That probably means you’re just watching your parasite’s favorite show.

“I’m sorry. You’ve caught us at a bad time. We were just about to head to the lake to do that thing where we celebrate America’s birthday by terrifying all of its dogs, so we’ve not been able to go through our normal meticulous process for evaluating a situation like yours. We’re not trying to be rude, we’re really not, but we have a narrow window in which I can get just drunk enough to not care that nobody has invented any new fireworks for the last thousand years.”

If you think about it, anxiety is also a kind of parasite.

Sometimes when life’s Warning Light won’t stop flashing, the best thing you can do is just put some electrician’s tape over it.

The wilderness is stupid and should be burned to the ground.

Depression means expending all your energy to avoid having to expend energy. I wish someone would invent a pill that would give me the motivation to go pick up my Lexapro refill.

I stepped out onto the rusty metal stairway to find the August night air had been pre-sweated for my convenience.

Next door was a convenience store called Open 24-7-365, with a slogan below it proclaiming, “We Are Always Here For You!” It was closed.

Humans will twist themselves into knots rather than admit that the unknown might be unknowable.

Here’s a piece of advice from me to you: If you ever have the chance to smell the inside of a person, don’t. Especially the liver.

“Not like this it doesn’t. New slang doesn’t come from straight white dudes, and it definitely doesn’t come from you. If you say it again, I will grab the wheel and run this van into a utility pole. So help me God, John, I will kill us both.”

“Yeah, well, if you don’t have something to yell at, you just turn the rage on yourself.”

After the laundry, the dishes were next. Fortunately, I hadn’t cooked even once and had just been reusing the same red Solo cup for two weeks. I tossed it in the trash. Dishes done.

Fear drove its fist deep into my butthole.

Note: I will never include a detailed description of our lovemaking in these books, at Amy’s request. If you want to imagine it, just picture a walrus attacking a rose garden with a jackhammer.

“Really? Jesus. Also I’m just now realizing that, as a team, we’d be more effective if it was just you, working alone.”

They wanted it to always be at the back of your mind, almost as if some forms of modern entertainment are really about creating a continuous sense of low-level anxiety.

There’s a good chance that person is in absolute agony, living in a world where the air is razor blades. If you know what that’s like, you’ve joined the secret society, an unseen subculture that was always around you but that you never knew existed because, let’s face it, you didn’t want to know.

“My friend, if we had a dollar for every time we got accused of killing somebody just because we showed up at the scene of their death-by-monster, we’d have, like, four dollars by now. Which I guess is not a lot of money unless you’re making it in this exact way.”

The idea that this man could age and even die like a normal human being briefly flattened me. He was our sage old mentor, our Dumbledore, our Obi-Wan Kenobi, our Qui-Gon Jinn, our Mufasa, our Wade Garrett from Road House, our Mickey from Rocky III. People like that can’t die.

“No,” said John, “this is being done by something even more terrifying: motivated nerds.”

It’s like if we had a chance to go back and kill baby Hitler. All philosophers agree that, in that situation, you’d yank that infant from his mother’s breast and three-sixty dunk that shit straight into a wood chipper.”

The Sauce, a.k.a. Shadow Jizz or Armus Sauce or whatever we were calling it now, is a drug in the same way that a land mine is a pedicurist.

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.

Everybody Calm the Fuck Down Humans act like assholes when they’re scared. Anybody who’s trying to keep you scared all the time just wants to breed more assholes into the world. Don’t let them do it.

If you embrace a Grand Theory of Everything that gives you permission to treat other people like shit, it’s likely that you started with the urge to treat people like shit and just worked backward to form your theory. Open your eyes, dude: They’re not heretics, they’re your neighbors.

Others have seen similar shadowy figures during episodes of a well-known phenomenon called sleep paralysis, in which a person wakes up enough to be conscious and aware, but not quite enough to stop dreaming. It’s always good to keep in mind that just because lots of people have seen a thing, doesn’t mean that thing necessarily exists. We’re all experiencing the world through similarly flawed brains and sense organs.