JDaE Final letter

My Final Lit Circle

This Letter is on the book I read with my LCP (Literature Circle Partners) called John Dies at the End. The book follows the lives of two young men who unfortunately are caught up in an evil plot to destroy the world (the usual). Soy Sauce is the special drug with the unique proprieties to be able to give its user the ability to see into other diminutions. These dimensions are what David and his best friend John get mixed up in. Narrated by the perverted and Soy Sauced David Wong it is a suspenseful horror story that will keep you guessing till the very end.

It is hard to say which to which type of audience this book would mainly target. Mostly because of the way the author writes could be for fantasy or suspense. I suppose this book main targets are the SyFy Fans and readers who want a little bit of blood and guts. And plenty of crude sexual humor puns. It is a relatively fast read. Why? Because all of it is true. This book is full of nonsense monsters and bloody #%<5$! Oh yeah, the proof is on frickin' page 152 'We did a search at the local library and found a story from a few years before where a man had died after getting his penis caught in a mole trap he was working on. He bled to death. We told his ghost that it wasn't his house anymore and he had to leave. He didn't react to us until after a few hours’ worth of badgering and he vanished. No more stained carpet.’ I laughed pretty hard when I read that little tid bit. Anyway this book really does remind me of something that I would see on the SyFy channel. And considering the fact that they are now making a movie out of it there will probability be a lot of those people not that there is anything wrong with that.
Since I'm on the subject I also have something else to say. What makes the mix horror and comedy so appealing? Obviously people watch horror movies for the same reason they ride a roller coaster or go bungee jumping. To get that sudden adrenaline rush that comes with the thrill of being scared and not knowing what’s going to happen next. All within a safe (well relatively safe as far as the bungee thing goes) environment. And as for comedy it is all for a good hardy laugh. I mean who doesn't like to let all their stress go into that one single burst of sound. I know I defiantly do. So when the movie people or whatever came up with the idea that it would be good to mix them both together. Their idea was a huge success and then turned into an avalanche of new movies, books, and other stuff like that. This got me thinking about another thought should we even be reading this kind of stuff. I don’t have the intention to preach about that not it at all but I’m just kind of wondering ‘What if a little boy picks up this book and reads all of this sort of grown up material?’I know it’s all a bunch of what ifs but really it’s true if you watch Casablanca then go watch the Atonement they are both very romantic movies but to most people now a day’s prefer to watch the Atonement mostly because it has a lot more sex scenes(which was obviously forbidden during Humphrey Bogart’s day) . What I am getting at is that now a days people are beginning to get way too accustomed to things that really aren’t real but to them certainly seem real. Like for instance say you were playing video game that just came out and it’s really high tech, it has the buttons, the sensors, and all that jazz. It’s also very violent and extremely graphic. But it doesn’t stop there it also requires a lot of practice and full attention. And you know the saying if you keep doing something over and over again that’s what’s going to happen. This is what I mean by is it good for comedy and horror to be a mix. Should people really laugh as someone is getting ripped apart by a she-he alien? Or snort until our sides hurt as some random person gets sawed in half their blood spurting in all directions. Or take this sample from page 155 ‘ What I saw at that moment was a clown standing there with his gut split raggedly open, as if cut with a dull razor. In this perfectly rendered shaped cartoon he was using his own white gloved hands to feed a rope of his own intestines into his mouth. But it was those eyes that got me. His expressive cartoon eyes pulsed with a terror about to boil over into madness. Tears streaked down his face, sweat beaded his forehead. Those eyes pleaded with me, looked right into me and screamed to be put out of his misery. Those eyes told a story, not of a man eating himself, but a man forced to eat himself.’ Do we really want to teach our children that its okay to use violence? You know how children are they see one thing they think it its alright they go do it… Everything goes down the tubes… Hey we were all kids once.

I’ve really only read one horror novel besides JDaE which would be Interview with a Vampire (I refuse to count Twilight in the category of horror). They were similar in two respects: One the main character had no choice to become a vampire (in David’s case it was Soy Sauce) and they both had plenty of juicy blood and gore scenes. For me personally I prefer Anne Rice’s book over Wong’s mostly because I liked the way she told the story. I think its because she writes more like me I don’t know.