Jason Pargin's I'M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM

I worry a bit, in the middle of the dumbest year in living memory (so far), that the people who most need to read Jason Pargin's I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, as well as those who are most going to appreciate it, are not going to bother finishing it because of its singular flaw, one that has been creeping very slowly into Pargin's work from the beginning: it's a bit didactic at times. As in there are some scenes that all but descend into Socratic dialogues.*

And there are no elements of hilarious supernatural horror (like in Pargin's John and Dave and Amy books), nor of over-the-top plutocratic science fiction (like in Pargin's Zoey Ashe books) in his latest novel. Pargin would seen to have concluded, like, say, William Gibson did before him (at least for the Bigend/Blue Ant trilogy) that the real, mundane world that we actually live in is plenty weird a setting for his brand of horrifying comedy and searing pathos, thank you very much. 

Which makes the fact that I was reading an ARC of I'm Starting to Worry... at the very instant the news first broke of the shooter at the Trump Rally in Butler, PA on July 13th of this stupid year of 2024 so freaking weird and perfect and unsettling that it made me feel like I was suddenly a bystander in either a John and Dave and Amy novel or a Zoey Ashe novel, for reasons I'll talk about here in a bit.

The plot of I'm Starting to Worry... chiefly concerns a disaffected young man, Abbott Coburn, who accepts a Lyft request from a mysterious woman who needs help transporting the titular Black Box, a roadie crate covered in band stickers, at least one of which stickers looks quite a lot like a radiation hazard sticker as depicted in the cover art, from California to Washington D.C. In Abbott's dad's tricked-out practically brand new Lincoln Navigator, of which Abbot believes his dad is more proud and protective of than he is of Abbot himself. 

We are treated, here and there, to  just enough foreshadowing about the eventual fate of box and car l, and about the subsequent fame of Abbot and the young woman, who gives the improbable but cool name of Ether when Abbott demands to know what to call her, to know that this trip they're planning is not going to go smoothly or end well. Which, of course it isn't; this is a Jason Pargin novel. His first book gave away an unhappy ending in its title! 

The duo's eventual fate is sealed by two unhappy circumstances they don't even know about until miles and days later, when one of them finally breaks the rules of the trip (don't look in the box, don't bring any devices that can track us, etc) and realizes that the Internet has lost its collective mind over their journey and conspiracy theories about it abound; the true point of I'm Starting to Worry... is thus revealed to be that said Internet has given us all a chronic case of what Malka Older named "Narrative Disorder" in her Centenal Cycle: our brains, already inclined to pattern seeking and narrative creation where neither pattern nor narrative actually exist, also can't really tell the difference between the stories it has fabricated and objective reality. Or at least not without more effort than most of us are used to expending to overcome the inherent efficiency/laziness of our brains, the better not to hog all the glucose so our muscles and organs can have some, too.

Anyway, not only did that sticker on the box capture the imagination of some of the worst sufferers ever of Narrative Disorder (aka Reddit users, which, get ready for them: big chunks of the novel take the form of conflicting theories, insults and wild speculation in Reddit threads, even unto the creation by rebels from one subreddit about the escapade of a whole 'nother one, denouncing the users and moderator of the original), but also, the vehicle Ether had originally tried to use to take the box cross country by herself... did in fact set off a radiation detector when investigators found it broken down and abandoned not far from where Abbott picked her up.

 

Oops.

So people think the pair are maybe some kind of terrorists transporting a dirty bomb to set off on the Mall in Washington D.C. No, wait, actually, Abbott is just a dupe in this plot, seduced into driving by Ether, who is a trained Russian sex-spy. No, the radiation is actually from an alien (or alien corpse) that the pair are transporting from a seekrit location to D.C. for a dramatic reveal to finally force Disclosure; Abbott and Ether are heroes! No, wait...

See why it was freaking weird to be reading this on the day a poor marksman took a potshot at the Republican nominee for POTUS?

Anyway, the mystery ropes in two unlikely "detectives" who have assigned themselves to the case: a recently retired FBI agent named Joan Key, and Abbott's father, Hunter, who, it turns out, actually does care quite a bit about his son, thank you (he's just really bad at, you know, emotions and stuff), and would really rather not see his boy go down in a hail of bullets on national TV.

But as Key and Hunter try to track Abbott and Ether -- Key to stop what she is sure is a terrible domestic terror threat that none of her former colleagues will take seriously, Abbott to save his son from certain death or even worse fates and also maybe congratulate him for finally doing something interesting with his life -- they can't help but join a howling pack of weirdos who are all doing the same thing for different reasons, spurred to action by the insanity on Reddit and Facebook, mostly, but also...

We find out early on that Abbott isn't just a Lyft driver who still lives with Daddy, but is also a YouTube streamer of middling popularity; this all really got touched off by a quick post to his channel advising that he was going to be offline for a while having a real life adventure. So some of his fans, hip to what's been going on on Reddit, etc long before Abbott himself is, are out to save him from the Evil Woman who tempted or kidnapped him into being her unwitting stooge.

And there's a big scary and heavily armed guy the duo refers to as the Tattoo Monster on their trail, too. The Tattoo Monster seems to know what's actually in the box and to believe that it's rightfully his, and is surprisingly resourceful for a dude who looks like he hasn't paid attention to anything since Hunter S. Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. In which Tattoo Monster (he has a real name but Tattoo Monster is more fun) could easily have been a character.

It all builds up to a satisfying climax in typical Pargin fashion, both way over the top and just believable enough, both coming at you out of nowhere and telegraphed almost from the first paragraph. 

In the middle, though, we get lots and lots and lots of pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Abbott and Ether, mostly about how much the world sucks and it's going to hell and it's especially bad for unattractive young white men (Abbott, who "spent half his life sensing he was in someone's way and the other half actually being in someone's way but failing to sense it") vs It's only bad from a very narrow, specific and privileged viewpoint and everyone really has a bad case of Internet poisoning and toxic levels of loneliness (Ether).

I have this theory that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what's happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It's like a filter that only shows you others' bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn't exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it's designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

- Ether, explaining why she refers to social media tech as the Black Box of Doom 

So yeah, if you're a fan of Pargin's old work at Crackd, his many podcast appearances on shows like Behind the Bastards, or his TikTok channel, these passages won't be too much of a bother, covering similar mythbuster-y ground to those, but they do slow down the action some and often feel quite preachy if you're already on Pargin's wavelength re: what modern technology and living standards and capitalism have done to our brains and how important it is to unplug and get some perspective -- I can only imagine but that is even worse for those who are not. So I'm sure lots of people are going to be online soon complaining that Pargin has Gone Woke or whatever new slang for pointing out that things could stand some improvement in the equity and kindness departments will be by the time the book is published later this year. 

For this was a Netgalley pick for me, and, weird July 13 experience it was for me, I'm mighty glad to have gotten it.

Pargin doesn't need fancy magic or sci-fi trappings to tell a great, and frequently funny, story. He made my auto-buy list a long time ago, but I maybe need to bump him up to must buy in hardcover.

*I'm aware that this is a strange context in which to use the word "descend" but this is supposed to be genre fiction, and Pargin's audience is not, I suspect, going to like the lecturing and arguing that characterizes a lot of the interactions between our protagonist and his primary companion. I'd love to be wrong!

Jason Pargin's IF THIS BOOK EXISTS YOU'RE IN THE WRONG UNIVERSE

I've been known to use a certain GIF rather a lot to express my reaction to a certain kind of news item or framing of same. I find it needs no explanation - this is a guy laughing his ass off as he simultaneously realizes that he -- and, incidentally, the rest of the world -- is deeply, deeply fucked.*

It's also a pretty good representation of my demeanor whenever one Jason Pargin, the novelist formerly known as David Wong, crashes a podcast, posts a TikTok (which he just started doing recently with some reluctance because he is not of that generation, but let me tell you he's killing it) or publishes another novel in the series originally known as JDATE (acronym for the title of the first novel, John Dies at the End), then as the John and Dave novels, and now for this fourth in the series finally and properly known as the John, Dave and Amy novels, giving Dave's long suffering but immensely capable and patient girlfriend her proper due. But now maybe they need to be called the John and Dave and Amy and Joy the Multiform From Another Dimension novels? But that might become unwieldy if/when he writes more.** Anyway, Pargin is the absolute master of eliciting the particular blend of emotions this GIF depicts, and it's not even close, to wit:

Pargin has made a name (or two) for himself as a tart and wry but painfully accurate commentator on a lot of the dumbest aspects of late 20th and early 21st century culture, first at Cracked and then with his prose fiction and acerbic nonfiction articles. He's like H.L. Mencken with carpal tunnel and mouse elbow.

And he likes horror, which is a genre perfectly suited to examining our dumb culture's greatest failings and dumbest pecadillos, his two boob heroes and the lady who loves them are both the best and the worst people to stand between us and the horrors we are loudly humming not to hear, squinting not to see, hurrying past, but then getting grabbed by a rubbery wig monster or giant hairy spider with a human tongue or [your grossest, most tasteless monster idea here] anyway. Who us gonna call? Sorry, wrong universe for the Ghostbusters, would Jay and Silent Bob with unwanted extrasensory perception and a predilection for shoddy homemade flamethrowers do?

Of course, one of the great unsung pleasures of these novels is watching the original duo, John and Dave (mostly Dave) develop from profane versions of the Scooby Gang But With Actual Monsters into well-rounded and relatively mature individuals capable of maintaining relationships with members of the community, clients, the police (for all that they still refer, in this new novel, to their primary contact as Detective Coiffure because dude uses a lot of hair gel) and each other. So on this fourth outing, they have real insight into why things keep happening the way they do and, most importantly and satisfyingly, real advice to give to people newly in the kind of predicaments in which they specialize. It's stopped being a tasteless joke, their world, for all that it still occasionally involves jaunts into side-universes where you can buy multiple flavors of vaginal cheese at the convenience store.

This new skill of theirs comes in very handy as they confront this novel's Big Bad in the form of a teenaged boy, Bas Galvaston (Bas is short for Sebastian, which, OK), who blundered into joining a sad cult of wannabe wizards only to quickly be singled out as their chosen one because it turns out he actually has powers. And this is where Pargin exercises his talent for extrapolating the worst possible version of current trends, because this cult is firmly convinced that not only is our entire universe a simulation, but that most of the people living in it are NPCs (non-player characters, i.e. just person-shaped software tools generated by the "game") and that the few real humans trapped within it would really be better off if the whole thing could just be shut down. Which Bas will eventually have the power to do, if correctly fostered, and if the cult in the here and now can assist by piggy backing on an incursion from a malign other dimension that has seeded our world with innocent seeming toy egg-with-app combos that, if correctly "fed" by the tyke lucky enough to possess an egg toy, will hatch into a cute stuffed animal of varying degrees of rarity -- except, of course, these eggs actually demand varying levels of human sacrifice ranging from bits of scalp to human teeth to eyeballs to skins and...

So yes, while our characters are somewhat more mature, the subject matter with which they're coping in the cursed town of Undisclosed is still as juvenile and gross as ever. And as universally threatening. It's just now that our heroes are starting to realize that they're not as young as they used to be, they're still in the socioeconomic basement of our society,  and that the precarity of their 20s is unsustainable, a theme given particular poignancy as Dave has several encounters with Fancy Dave, an alternate version of himself from a timeline in which John actually died, causing Dave to settle into a somewhat normal life married to Amy and raising children with her. Confronting the fact that this could be possible in any timeline shakes Dave even as he is forced to commit to saving the timeline in which none of it does, making this fourth JDATE the most affecting of them all so far, showing how much Pargin has grown as a storyteller while still very much being the guy who writes about using fireworks to destroy a brain-eating parasite that has caused a poor slob to hallucinate an entire happy relationship with a lady.

I sure hope there are some more of these in the pipeline.

*For those unable to place this, it's the final scene of John Carpenter's woefully underrated 1994 classic In the Mouth of Madness in which an insurance investigator, John Trent (Sam Neil) is sent on a wild shoggoth chase in northern New England to prove that the mysterious disappearance of the world's greatest horror novelist, Sutter Kane (Jürgen Prochnow) was actually a hoax to drum up publicity for his latest blockbuster novel, which is rumored to drive its readers insane. It is simply the best, but it's stupidly hard to find streaming most of the time. It's worth any effort to track it down, though, I assure you. 

**I really hope it's "when" dear readers.

David Wong's THIS BOOK IS FULL OF SPIDERS

There are surely worse worlds in the multiverse than the one in which David Wong gets to write all of the books.

The podunk white trash Lovecraftian worlds David Wong writes about, for instance. Worlds which might closely resemble our own but for the presence of Shadow Men and titular parasitic eyeball spiders that get up in people's brains and manipulate first their brains and then their biology and turn them into monsters of various imaginative sorts. Those.

John Dies at the End (JDATE to fans) was one of the silliest, weirdest, most messed-up and entertaining books I've ever read (the film adapted from it somewhat less so, but it was still a lot of fun), so my expectations going into this sequel were pretty high, perhaps unreasonably so. They were sort of met, but only sort of.

This Book is Full of Spiders, having a first act like JDATE to follow, did, alas fall short of delivering the same quality of guffaws and jaw-dropping inventiveness JDATE had but I don't think that's what Wong was going for here. For This Book is Full of Spiders gets surprisingly somber at times. Which is all right as far as it goes; while chucklehead slacker heroes John and Dave are terribly amusing to follow, it would be a mistake not to let them learn from their experiences and develop as characters. Which they have done, sort of, at least inasmuch as Dave is a boyfriend now with duties, responsibilities, lots of hand holding and sighing and oh wait, that's Bernard Black. But anyway, you get the idea.

John, thank goodness, is still John, which might surprise people who have the title of the first John and Dave book in mind, but there he is. He's not making cell phone calls that are unstuck in time this go-around, but he still has plenty of stupid ideas that somehow manage to keep the plot from turning into a straightforward bit of disaster porn (but that also mocks the fans of disaster porn, witness the bunch of college hipsters who load up and RV with a whole gun shop's worth of crap and drive it right into the teeth of the crapstorm and insist that videogames have prepared them for apocalyptic good times and they're the only heroes anybody needs, but I digress).

For disaster there most certainly is, in the form of the aforementioned parasitic spiders from another dimension that crawl into people's heads and take them over, spiders that only John and Dave can see as a residual effect of last novel's unwitting experimentation with the multidimensional drug they call Soy Sauce. It starts off small, the spider problem. One is discovered in Dave's bed in the wee hours of one fateful morning, chewing on his leg. He reacts Davishly. He gets John involved. Everything goes wrong and spirals out of control. Because John and Dave.

Along the way, we are treated to more than a bit of pop evolutionary psychology, not all of it coming from Dave's therapist-nemesis, Dr. Tennet; we could read this book as a white trash excursis on the consequences of primate neurology and the fact that our brains are wired to be able to handle a max of about 150 real social connections, but with gunfire and explosions and monsters. This is pulled off pretty well, actually.

What isn't pulled off so well this time around is the narration. JDATE was all first-person, from the entertaining point of view of Dave, who is an undereducated but wickedly intelligent smart ass of a guy with a talent for undercutting the grandiosity of what is around him by boiling a lot down to fart jokes and the like. TBIFOS, however, intercuts his first person narrative with long stretches of third person omniscient whenever the action goes to John or to Dave's girlfriend, the wonderfully down-to-earth and sensible Amy. That all of these sections are often in anything but chronological order -- we frequently get chapter headings telling us that the next bit is, say, eight hours earlier and the like -- is not as annoying as the shift from first to omniscient third is, to me, but then I like my stories to be a bit wibbly wobbly timey wimey once in a while. What I don't like is when they feel lazy or sloppy, and the narration choices here feel a lot like both. Harumph.

Still, I had a good time. If there's another sequel in the works, I'll have a look. If a film gets made of this, I'll watch it. Because John and Dave.

David Wong's JOHN DIES AT THE END #OneBookAtATime

If you've always dreamed of Bill & Ted reuniting to make a horror film, if you like the elaborate magical systems dreamed up by Tim Powers but think they're too well-planned and logical, if you think the head growing legs and crawling away gag in John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is the best SFX ever, if you love the combination of buddy comedy and demon hunting in Reaper... I believe I have found your new favorite book.

John Dies at the End is long on imaginative gore and slapstick horror, but short on sense. Part of this is, I suspect, by design; our protagonist Dave Wong (wink) and his friend John are shrewd but poorly educated working class stiffs who stumble upon a drug that allows -- indeed forces -- the user to see into other dimensions, most of which are way scarier than ours, menacing and gross and hostile to humanity, and thereby uncover a multidimensional conspiracy to take over and effectively destroy our world. Their grasp on what is going on is usually, therefore, on the slack side, and so, therefore, is our hero's narration -- long on pop culture references and descriptions of things as "stupid" or "retarded", short on sense.

But what John Dies at the End lacks in sense, it makes up for in sheer inventiveness and flair. Wong was at great pains to invent all new monsters, though he was obviously inspired by Stephen King's lobstrosities (but his monsters rarely ask nonsensical questions while they attack). I was particularly amused/sickened by, for instance, the "wigmonsters" that trash a famous paranormal hunter's floor show in a Las Vegas casino. They're quite Carpenteresque, multiform and multi-limbed and multi-eyed, and are, in fact, wearing jaunty little wigs complete with rubber chinstraps. And they are equipped with scorpion-like stingers that pump their victims full of the Drug of Dimensional Seeing.

There are body-snatchings, "alien" abductions, gunfights, sword fights (sort of), bombs and beer bongs. There is an abandoned shopping mall infested fire-breathing coyotes and deer with pincers at the end of their antlers. Exploding dogs and explosions of dog feces. Road trips. And then there's the Bill and Ted element: several times our heroes' bacon is saved by timely delivery of objects or information that could only be achieved via time travel. And John's spirit, or something, seems to be unstuck in time (as is their dog, Molly) and able to make cell phone calls to Dave even while Dave is sitting with the supposed real John. This is never explained but it's amusing enough to let it slide.

Anyway, I liked it well enough to take the trouble to get my hands on the sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, which I'll be reading in due course. But first, I have promises to keep.