Hey, did I ever give you guys the link to the John Dies at the End website? I bet I didn’t, because I am a deplorable piece of shit. ‘Deplorable’ is today’s word. Deplorable.
Alternatively, ‘David Wong’ (not his real name) is the Senior Editor at cracked.com. So, you know, I encourage you to stalk him.
Do you want to see a trailer for the upcoming film? Yeah, you do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=SgrB7eaiFQQ
“Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.”
I wonder if you’re the screamish type? I’ve always assumed that if you’re reading this blog in the first place and you’re attracted to the kind of perverted humour that I am routinely shovelling into the gaping maw of the internet, that you’ve got to have a strong stomach. I could be wrong. Maybe you don’t even like Chuck Palahniuk, I mean how would I know?
Hello, by the way. I always forget that bit. I hope you’re all well.
Today’s book is David Wong’s ‘John dies at the end’. And if you’ve not already guessed, this book is probably not for the faint hearted. I’m not sure how to describe it. If you could imagine what would happen if Douglas Adams’ DNA was spliced with Lovecraft’s, the result would probably be something like this novel. Horror-slash-scifi-slash-humour-slash-something.
Normally I wouldn’t try to peddle a book that tries to span the genres, (because hey, those books are like cheap floozies. Fun to flirt with but you’ll never take them home to meet mother). But this book has a clever sort of humour about it that I’m always on the lookout for. It’s witty in places and downright ridiculous in others. Perfect, perfect, perfect. It’s the lead characters in particular that I am drawn to – Dave and John, two twenty-something timewasters who gain the unique ability to see monsters and demons who are bleeding through to this world from another hellish dimension. They task themselves, (or rather, John tasks them), with the mission of fighting these creatures. And in case you’re in any doubt of whether or not these guys are heroes, I refer to you to chapter 10 of the book – where Dave realises a demon is spying on him through his tv. His immediate reaction is to call John, who rushes over to his apartment to press his balls up against the television screen and then they both play on the Playstation for the rest of the evening. That’s right. And if I ever found out my tv was possessed, that’s probably what I would do too. I’d have to borrow someone’s Playstation (and testicles), but damn it, that’s what I’d do.
I just read over that last paragraph and it strikes me that I’ve just tried to put the entire plot into layman’s terms and failed. To the diehard ‘John Dies’ fans out there, I apologise. I’m trying not to give too much of the plot away at this point - so you must admit, the above is as good a summary as any. The rest of the plot will fall effortlessly into place once you read it. Even the bit with the bratwurst.
This book has some unique origins – it started out as an online story, but quickly mutated into a cult classic and now it’s being made into a Hollywood motion picture. I’ve got some links to post up here for you guys, but before I do, I’m going to post you the blurb from the back of the book – it’s what first got me hooked so I’m hoping it works on you guys too. You’re going to want to read this book now, you little hipsters, before the film gets released in 2012 and suddenly everyone’s trying to clamber on to the bandwagon.
Here you go:
“STOP.
- You should not have touched this book with your bare hands.
- No. Don’t put it down. It’s too late.
- They’re watching you.
My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours.
You may not want to know about the things you’ll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it’s too late. You touched the book. You’re in the game. You’re under the eye.
The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book to the end. Even the part about bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.
THE IMPORTANT THING IS THIS:
- THE DRUG IS CALLED SOY SAUCE, AND IT GIVES USERS A WINDOW INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION.
- JOHN AND I NEVER HAD THE CHANCE TO SAY NO.
-YOU STILL DO.
Unfortunately for us, if you make the right choice, we’ll have a much harder time explaining how to fight off the otherwordly invasion currently threatening to enslave humanity.
I’m sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial that you keep one thing in mind.
NONE OF THIS IS MY FAULT.”
I’m super excited about this new book I’m reading. SPOILER ALERT! Everybody poops.
Why do I love her so much? I don’t quite know. The truth is, up until recently Frankenstein was just one of those books that I always meant to get round to reading – it took a rainy day indoors and my internet connection flat-lining for me actually to sit down and give old Shellers a chance.
‘Old Shellers’? Jesus. I hate myself so much, I can taste it in my mouth.
‘Frankenstein’ is so much more than a classic horror novel. It’s sort of a proto-science fiction novel too. Of course to our modern society, the idea of using electricity to bring a cut-and-paste patchwork zombie to life seems ridiculous – but in regency England, the threat seemed very plausible. After all, electricity as a harvestable force had only just been discovered. Galvanism was in full swing. Up and down Europe, corpses of condemned men were all too available to scientists looking to hook something up to an electric probe.
Nowadays, we know different. Electricity is good for stopping and starting the heart, but that’s about it. Sorry Shellers, but no reanimating the dead for you! But whatever the case, those Georgians had bloody good fun with their public displays of Galvanism, and shooting electric currents through dead people. The resulting muscle spasms – the clenched fists, the kicking legs, all those dead faces, grimacing like they were in pain – well, that was just about enough to scare the shit out of anyone. If you didn’t know any better, then of course it would look like the corpses were about to spring back to life. It’s no different from when you were a little kid, and it seemed kind of plausible that we would colonise the moon by 2012.
Hey, it could happen, I guess. There’s still time.
But I digress. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is today’s hot topic. It’s a firm favourite of mine, not only because it’s such a classic tale – but because of Shelley herself. It’s was written in the Regency period, people. This was a time when Jane Austen published all of her novels under the pseudonym ‘A Lady’, because a female novelist was considered to be so disgraceful back then. And let’s be honest, Pride and Prejudice isn’t exactly racy, is it? There’s some hardcore hand-holding in there, but that’s about it. Frankenstein is about reanimating the dead. The fact that Mary Shelley was eighteen at the time just makes me love her more.
People like that come along very rarely- the true innovators. Rebel spirits. I feel like I spend my whole life seeking these people out – looking for people who just won’t do what’s expected of them.
Oh, and waiting for the moon to get colonised, of course.
Let’s play pretend! I’ll go first.
Let’s pretend it’s three days before payday and you’re broke. Let’s pretend you make seven bucks an hour. You live in the poor-ass part of town with your hypertensive mother and, oh yeah, you don’t have a car. I guess this means you rely on public transport to get wherever you need to go. Whatever. Let’s say for the sake of argument you do.
And let’s pretend the mayor has just advised immediate evacuation of the city. It doesn’t matter where you go, he says, just haul your ass out of there and take only what you need. In less than twenty-four hours your city faces what this mayor refers to as a ‘doomsday scenario’. All the lanes of the interstate are open, but they’re leading out of the city.
Your mother is sick, you’re waiting on your welfare check, the buses are cancelled. You’ve got twenty-four hours. How do you get out?
How do you get out?
Nah, I’m done pretending. The fact is, you probably wouldn’t get out – and neither did a lot of the people in New Orleans some six years ago. Hurricane Katrina may well have been The Big One, but by the time it was brought to the people’s attention exactly how serious this hurricane was going to be, a lot of the people didn’t have the option of leaving town. No choice but to board up their windows and hope for the best. After all, New Orleans had hurricanes all the time, right? How bad could this one be?
Oh right, I was supposed to be plugging a book. Sorry.
Today’s recommendation comes in the form of Times-Picayune journalist Chris Rose and his collection of newspaper articles. His book,‘1 Dead in Attic’, is different from most Katrina books. It focuses a little less on who’s to blame for the systemic failings that plagued New Orleans during the reign of Katrina, (or ‘that bitch’, as people have taken to calling her). Instead, Rose is more interested in painting a picture of post-apocalyptic life in the Crescent City. A world with no neighbours and no electricity. A world of post-traumatic stress and taped-up refridgerators.
Remember – the first rule of post-apocalyptic society is ‘don’t open that fridge’. Trust me on this.
I feel like I can’t do this kid justice, so instead I’m going to give you an extract and leave you to it. Chris Rose’s struggle to come to terms with his new-found ghost town was enough to leave me dazed for the most of today. A little heartsick. I got a small glimpse of what other people had to go through and it made me hurt. I’m not sure how they did it.
But blah, blah, blah – this is just me talking. The words are better coming from the pen of Chris Rose. Here’s that extract I promised you:
“I came to Wisner a lot last fall, in the dark days, and I would always pass a dead guy on a bench on the front porch in a house in the middle of the block next to the playground.
He was there for three weeks before anyone came and took him away. His name was Alcede, and it got so I started saying hello to him when I passed by.
If you were here in the days of pain, everywhere you go now, there’s some memory staring you in the face. What it used to look like. But that’s another story for another time.
At Wisner, I was shooting hoops when two little kids rolled up and asked if they could play with me. Some older kids were playing at the other end of the court and it’s a free country so I said yes even though what I really wanted was to be alone and banging the ball hard and working up a sweat and forgetting everything about Alcede and what [the government] did to the playgrounds in this town.
But what are you going to say? Scram, kids?”
Oh my god, Chuck Palahniuk has a new book out. It’s called ‘Damned’, (a sort of post-modern Dante’s Inferno), and it’s the first book in Palahniuk’s new trilogy. I’m so excited, I could crap my pants.
Amazon has an excerpt up, if anyone is interested in reading it. You bloody ought to be. The link is here:
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck was Chuck Palahniuk?
I hope you’re as excited as I am! Go out and buy it. Don’t touch my copy, because I’ll cut your fingers off.
Toodles <3.
It’s been bloody noisy all week. You know why. Those ‘little tinkers’, (as my fireman friend so elegantly put it), have been torching cars and looting supermarkets up and down the country. If you’re not familiar with the politics of the situation, I’m not going to bore you with it. I lack both the tact and the intelligence to explain it all anyway. Instead, I’m going to refer you to The Guardian, and let them bore you on my behalf. The Guardian might be up it’s own arse sometimes, but it’s not as right-wing or toss-potty as most newspapers nowadays. This article is from Russell Brand, (yes, remember him? The man that rang up Andrew Sachs, and gave his answerphone machine the time of it’s life). If anyone is qualified to talk about capers gone wrong, it’s this guy.
“I remember Cameron saying “hug a hoodie” but I haven’t seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don’t vote, they’ve realised it’s pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the “we don’t give a toss about you” party.”
So, today’s recommendation is… news. You can check out the full article here at the Guardian Website.
And, you know, stay safe and all that. Don’t do anything this moronic little blogger wouldn’t do.
Moral Ambiguity is a blog for those of us who love books but hate people. I'm optimistically using the word 'us' here. It's possible that I'm the only person in the world who feels this way, but y'know. Whatever.
 |
 |
|
