This Book is Brilliantly Bonkers

Pros:

• An amazing main character and two very excellent supporting characters. I want to be friends with these people.
• A completely insane story that makes me want to write clichés about rollercoasters. (Nonstop thrill ride! Hold on tight! Etc.!)
• Funny stuff.
• Gross stuff.
• Surprisingly thought-provoking stuff.
• A palpable sense of dread during the appropriate suspensey parts, and an urge to stomp around heroically during the ‘frak yeah!’ parts.
• An ending that manages to not tie up everything in a neat little bow, but still be satisfying.
• Marvelously original.

Cons:

• The author’s overuse of the word ‘immediately.’

Seriously. That’s it. This book is intense and amazing and SO fun. I listened to the audio book on my drive to and from work, and when I was snowed in for three days, I seriously worried about the characters. “Is Amy going to make it out of Best Buy? Can John break into the quarantine zone armed only with the mystery box?” (Not worried enough to go out in the cold and fetch the discs, but what are you gonna do.)

The plot sounded simple until I started trying to summarize it. David and John are best friends who have kind of fallen into a life of fighting ghosts and monsters and things that go bump in the night. They’re like seriously slacker versions of the Winchesters, except they live on a Hellmouth, so the monsters come to them. When David wakes up one morning to find a spidery creature with too many legs trying to climb in his mouth, he knows that this does not bode well for his day. Soon, the spiders are possessing/infecting people all over town, the military moves in to quarantine everything, and David, John, and Amy (David’s girlfriend) are separated and keep trying to rescue each other. Oh, and save the world.

That’s basically the gist, but there’s so much more to it than that. There are regular crises (how do we save the quarantine area from a military ‘cleansing?’) and moral crises (should we save the quarantine area from a military cleansing?) and impassioned speeches to heartless bureaucrats and cuss-laden speeches about weaponry from John and narrow escapes and outbreaks and massacres and double-crosses and MORE.

Just read it. It’s so much fun. It’s actually the sequel to John Dies at the End. I’ve seen the movie, but haven’t read the book – it’s next on my list. I want to spend more time with David and Amy and John.