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.

Patrick E. McLean's THE MERCHANT ADVENTURER

We've all played those fantasy games. The ones where we loot every corpse in sight (because why not, it's not like we can smell them, or feel the slimy grossness), break into every provisions barrel, crack open every chest, perform every quest in the promise of loot, glorious loot, as much as we can carry, LOOOOOOOOOOT.

But then we get overburdened. We start having to pass up some loot, or to get rid of loot to pick up better loot. And we don't have any place to store our loot because we're still saving up for a house. A house we must buy for gold.

So what we need to do is, we need to turn that loot into gold. And for that we need to visit the Store.

Ah, the Store, whereat arcane algorithmic calculations of varying complexity (depending on the game) and fairness calculate how many pieces of gold each piece of loot is worth. And we sell and trade and unencumber ourselves. Maybe we improve our equipment a bit. Maybe we get rid of a weapon or piece of armor or object that we can't use because we're the wrong class or don't have high enough stats or whatever.

Ever thought about what happens to the stuff we sell and trade after that? Ever wonder what the NPC behind the counter does when we're not haggling with him?

Patrick McLean did, and he decided he'd find out, and thus we have The Merchant Adventurer, a novel that celebrates all of the silly approximations we play through in fantasy games but sends out a fat old man with a Bag of Holding full of all of the best stuff from his store, on a quest of his very own!

Boltec, our titular hero, reminds me more than a little bit of another fat old man hero whom I loved a lot, Adoulla from Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon. In his youth, he was as starry-eyed and keen to be a hero as Relan, the eager young farmboy he has sort of backed into befriending; now he is tired and cynical and keen on nothing but his wealth -- or almost nothing.

Turns out, and he's as surprised as anyone, he also loves one Asarah, the supremely confident, competent, and beautiful in that "mature" way owner and operator of the tavern across the street from his shop.*

The tavern that gets burned down when an evil wizard and his orc army sack the village and make of with Asarah, not for prurient purposes, but because the wizard needs somebody on staff who can make 

a decent sandwich.

Don't worry, it gets addressed.

But lest you think this is going to be a story involving a lot of training and work to recover lost fighting skills, or to train up a new generation... Nah! Boltac knows his skill set. Boltac is going to use his skill set. Boltac is going to make a deal.

Along the way we encounter lots of other amusing archetypes from the fantasy game world, including a shifty thief and the aforementioned wizard (who has really had it with all of these adventurers interrupting his studies to try and steal his stuff), but there is also, of all things, a sympathetic orc character, Samga.

I kind of love Samga almost as much as I love Boltac, you guys.

The resulting novel is a fun little romp (though yes, it could maybe have used one more whack from the Claymore of Copy-Editing) , one that was obviously even more fun for MacLean to write than for us to read. Fun for everybody!

Except maybe that poor troll trapped under the Mace of Encumbrance. Poor fella. So confused when his dinner offered him a big shiny toy to hold for a moment.

Hee hee!

*So, yes, cast Alex Kingston as Asarah and be done with it. Maybe Ian MacNiece as Boltac while you're at it.

Howard of Warwick's THE HERETICS OF DE'ATH

You may recall last fall when my book-crazy mother, fan of all things with even a hint of medieval mystery fiction, turned me on to Howard of Warwick and his truly side-splitting historical farce, The Domesday Book, No Not That One. I was doubled over, I was in tears, I was gasping for air. I took many months to recover from teh funneh.

Then I finally attempted another of Mr. Of Warwick's books, and while I did not have quite the same life-threatening experiences, I did have a pretty good time getting to know one Brother Hermitage, who made a cameo appearance in Domesday but whose true character awaited discovery.

His true character being sort of an idiot savant Brother William of Baskerville, or a very sheltered Sherlock Holmes. And yes, he has an Adso/Watson of sorts in the redoubtable person of one Wat the Weaver, purveyor of pornographic tapestries, in other words, a perfect wordly foil to the decidedly unworldly Hermitage.*

In this first novel of his chronicles, Hermitage finds himself in a situation somewhat similar to that which made Brother William famous**, namely, a murder in a monastery.***Or at least a death, one which seems perfectly natural at first, but the innocent-seeming narrative of which is quickly seized on by powers greater than Hermitage as a way to further decidedly un-innocent ends.

How great those powers are, what is their scheme, and how it all relates to an exceedingly obscure and farcically pointless theological argument (did Jesus get sand in his shoes while enduring his 40 days in the wilderness?) (No, really, that's the point of contention) is kept secret until the denouement, when an entire novel's worth of bizarre and maddening tension is released as rapidly -- and perhaps with much the same sound -- as a balloon that has been inflated, but not tied off, flies around a room.

Or, in other words, this time around, the belly laughs are saved up for a big gasping mess at the end, like, say, verbs in a German sentence. As described by my mom, anyway.****

Speaking of the ending, it also sets up the most ridiculous conspiracy theory, maybe ever, concerning a certain very famous event in English history.

Now, if I can just figure out what a Dingle is. It can't be what my inner twelve-year-old thinks it is.

Great stuff. My compliments to the scribe.

*Whose name, we learn, was bestowed on him early in his monastic career, when his fellow monks realized his nature as a big ol' dork even by monk standards, and suggested strongly the he consider a life of contemplative solitude. And silence.

**I'm talking about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which every reasonably civilized person should at least watch in cinema form if they're not up to reading its very dense and allusive and erudite pages. But you'd be cheating yourself, however wonderful the film is (which is very).

***An edifice which rejoices in the name of De'Ath's Dingle. Um.

****I don't know much German.

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.

Jasper Fforde's LOST IN A GOOD BOOK #OneBookAtATime

"Confused is exactly how all cadets to Jurisfiction should enter their first assignment!" -- Miss Havisham to Thursday Next in Lost in a Good Book

Last summer, I dipped my toe into the weird waters of Jasper Fforde's chronicles of Thursday Next, voyager through fiction, literary detective, time traveler's daughter and hard-working civil servant in an alternate universe in which literature is taken way, way more seriously than it is in our own. And it took me a while to recover from all the crazy-cool insanity packed into that flawed but fun novel, The Eyre Affair, the experience of reading which was like hanging out with a precocious teenager who felt the relentless need to keep impressing one with his precocity every two minutes or so. Nice kid, don't want to discourage him or hurt his feelings, but dude!

Keep reading, my Fforde-loving friends encouraged. The series gets better.

My Fforde-loving friends were right, though we still have kind of a hot mess on our hands in this second installment.

There is time travel, and the consequences thereof -- a storyline involving the "eradication" not only of Thursday's husband, who was not rescued from drowning when he was two years old, but also of Thursday's father, who was never conceived. Yeah, like that. There is more bewildering fiction-delving of a kind that knocks the plot of The Eyre Affair into a cocked hat -- Thursday is still a LiteraTec operative, but has also, as part of her effort to un-eradicate her husband (by whom she is pregnant, even though he doesn't exist), been inducted into the corps of "Jurisfiction", a band of fictional characters who police literature to keep it from getting tampered with; Thursday is apprenticed to Miss Havisham (of Great Expectations fame, rotting wedding dress and all)* and gets sucked into Havisham's endless and bitter rivalry with the Red Queen. Yeah, like that. And, in one of the silliest and most clever scenes I've yet seen Fforde pull off,  Thursday's disciplinary hearing into her conduct within the text of Jane Eyre during The Eyre Affair that saved the novel from oblivion but gave it a happier ending (that happier ending being the one we know as canonical) is conducted by the Magistrate from Franz Kafka's The Trial. Yeah, it's like that.

Oh, and there's the little matter of impending doom; in December, 1985, something is going to happen that turns all organic life on planet Earth into pink slime. This is kind of Thursday's problem, too.

That's a lot of narrative pins to keep juggling, but Fforde does pull it off**. I would have liked it all just a little better without the extra layer of unnecessary faux supplementation he added to each chapter, though; Frank Herbert/Dune-style, he "quotes" from various fictional sources that do not really give the reader much in the way of additional insight and do, sometimes, telegraph events and appearances that would have been more enjoyable as surprises in the novel text. This crutch is a lot less annoying than the narrative-voice gaffes I found so annoyingly distracting in The Eyre Affair, but it's still something I fervently hope Fforde outgrows as he gains confidence in his ability to tell, and his readers' ability to follow, these richly complex and rewarding stories. As it was, about halfway through the book I simply started to ignore them, and yes, the second half of the book seemed much more enjoyable.

And since this was already a very enjoyable book, that's really saying something. Thursday's world(s) is/are charmingly daffy, teeming with hilariously dastardly villains, madcap old ladies who drive like bats out of hell and intimidate landlords with walking sticks and icy stares, inter-species relations with a small tribe of cloned Neandrathals who have a richly nuanced culture all their own but were sequenced to be incapable of reproducing, office politics and the uniquely troubling difficulties faced by a young woman suddenly thrust into the public eye and also pregnant by a man who never existed. It's heady stuff, and great fun, and I'm in for the long haul with this series.

Thursday? Next!

*Which, get ready for Havisham, who all but steals the novel. As Fforde portrays her extra-novelar (yes I just made that up) life, she reminds me a lot of Diana Trent in the amazing Britcom Waiting For God. If there is ever a film of these, I demand Havisham be played by Stephanie Cole. So, hurry up, film world, if you're gonna. Cole isn't getting any younger.

**Well, mostly. One of the denouements winds up relying on a pretty lame idea that somehow fictional characters can't follow back-and-forth dialogue without dialogue tagging, but I guess I can forgive that. Or at least, I can try.

100 Books #101 - Justin Robinson's MR. BLANK

Was Tobias Knight your favorite character in Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's fiction, or did you at least wonder what it would be like to be him?

Did you dig X-Files but think it was kind of cheap that Mulder & Scully only had to deal with one freakshow at a time? And too much FBI red tape?

Do conspiracy theories make you horny, baby?

Then, brother, have I got the novel for you.

The title character in Mr. Blank makes Tobias Knight, quintuple agent, look like a monogamous pansy. As he tells us in the novel's exquisitely perfect opening sentence, "Every conspiracy needs a guy like me." The sad bit is, as he goes on to explain, he's that guy for every single conspiracy. And there's only so much of him to go around. So, he has established more false identities than any sane person could keep track of, each with its own email address, cell phone and contract, and contact within a secret organization; the Masons know him by one name, the Satanists by another, etc. Across conspiracies, though, he is at core the same guy: the go-to guy, a low-level initiate/enthusiast who is willing to be the gopher, delivery guy, purchasing agent, evidence hider, witness confuser, whatever dumb little task you need today, Worshipful Sir or Ma'am or Thingie.

The premise could work with any number of plots (har har). The temptation that could waylay it being just to watch him in action, which could be fun as the quotidian-for-him early pages establish; his to-do list (or lists, one for each identity/role) are quite entertaining. I was especially amused by bits like this one: "Commercial candy is allowed to have up to five rat droppings per ounce by law. What they don't say is what kind of rat droppings or whose job it is to put them there."

You get the idea.

So this could have turned into the kind of sprawling hot mess that the Illuminatus! Trilogy (clearly its primary inspiration) was, but Robinson was more interested in producing a piece of quality genre fiction/entertainment than in imparting his mystic-comic wisdom to us in a gigantic parable. I think. At any rate, he found a plot that worked, the good old "someone is trying to kill me and this stacked redhead I just happened to meet along the way" that's straight out of mid-century crime noir. Hey, why mess with perfection?

And this book is so close to genre-mashing perfection that it's almost painful to contemplate how it also kind of bothered me: there's a major sub-plot involving female body-image politics that I didn't quite like, pitting one conspiracy of Rubenesque, curvy women (the stacked redhead and her fuller-figured overladies, whom Mr. Blank refers to as "hippos" and worse) against another of stick-thin model-pushers (though bonus points for the neologism "ascetorexics"). Mr. Blank more or less comes down on the side of the former, mostly due to the presence at his side of their prettiest and smartest (Mina, whom he wants to "paint on the side of a bomber"), so I guess there's that, but still, focusing on that one characteristic of a woman -- her body, her shape -- still counts as objectification, whether you're turned on by it or not, guys. Ew.

If that kind of thing doesn't bother you*, or if it does but you're able to square your shoulders and march on and get past it and focus on all the good stuff, this is quite an enjoyable read. Fnord.

*And usually I'm of this camp, able to dismiss the odd quip about a female character's appearance or a gay character's clothing or whatever as just something that is missing the mark with me but that the author felt necessary to include to appeal to other readers. But here, it is very much front and center, with Mr. Blank all but smacking his lips over Mina on almost every page. What saves it is that she notices this, calls him on it, and occasionally delivers the kind of reprimand that leaves a mark. So that brings up a question for me that I'm not sure I have the answer to: does the presence of a strong and self-determined female character who refuses to be a sidekick justify or compensate adequately for the author's over-the-top rubbing of my readerly nose in all of this body-image crap? Like I said, I don't have an answer, so my annoyance is only mostly assuaged by the fact that everything else in this book was over-the-top awesome.

VINYL - Frank Zappa's "You Didn't Try to Call Me"

Many thanks to the brilliant Walter Hawn for the heads up about this new-to-me track. It has everything I love Frank Zappa for -- bizarre and quirky lyrics, complex instrumentation that still manages to sound like good old stripped-down rock'n'roll, and just a hint of sentimentality.

Zappa comes off as a condescending jerk sometimes, but all is always forgiven for the way he tickles my brain and my earholes. I speak in the present tense, for he is with us always in the grooves of vinyl and memories of the first time we heard something like Lumpy Gravy and demanded to know: "What the Snape was that?"

Back in my extra-contrarian twenties, when I was a state Libertarian Party official in Massachusetts, I kept lobbying the rest of the crew to get bumper stickers made up that read "Frank Zappa: He may be dead, but he'd still make a better president than you."