#Jason pargin

[victusinveritas]

[skrytch]

Been reading Jason "David Wong" Pargin's newest book "If this book exists, you're in the wrong universe" and... Damn if this passage just ain't too real

[my-whumpy-media]

[burninglesbian]

Drew these losers during work. Kinda love it. That's what I imagine them in the books.

[jadlz]

do u see my vision

[ryumako]

I read the Zoey Ashe series casually over like five weeks in the spring, it almost gave me fandom brain again, and at the very least restored my faith in my ability to get lost in books. Definitely gave me the confidence to buy physical copies of all four John Dies at the End books while knowing nothing about them aside from Jason Pargin's brain being behind the curtain. I'm now basically done with the fourth volume in less than three weeks and I already feel the void coming. Gonna to have to fill it with other satire that probably won't hit as hard. Gonna have to write the author and tell him what his stuff has done for me. I haven't been fixated on any media in years at this point but I wanna live in the JDATE world!!

[kuiperblog]

Book Review: I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

I have finished reading I'm Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin.

The premise of this book is simple, and rather than trying to summarize it myself, I will give you the author's blurb:

One day, a woman you've never met before offers you $100,000 in cash to drive her across the country—half now, half when you arrive. It’s a 2,600-mile trip, but there's a catch. She has a large, locked black box, big enough for someone to crawl inside. You're not allowed to look inside the box or even ask questions about it. She insists you leave behind all devices that can be tracked—no phone, no laptop, no credit cards, no GPS. You'll be paying with cash and navigating with a paper map the entire way. And finally, you can't tell anyone where you're going. There's no time to think; she says you must leave now. You hesitate, and she doubles the offer. Would you do it? Maybe, if you're brave or desperate enough. And besides, you think, what’s the worst that could happen?

I read it. I enjoyed it! I think it's my favorite Jason Pargin novel. One of the things that I have always liked about his novels are the fun action set pieces, and the way he builds tension throughout a scene, and across an entire book. He delivers on that here, and I am incredibly impressed with how he managed to stick the landing on this one: near the end of the book, I found myself thinking, "there's no way that this could have a climax that manages to surprise me without being a total letdown," but he proved me wrong: the big climax was completely unexpected, yet expertly "earned" by all the little bits that built up to it. It really all came together in the end in a way that far exceeded my expectations.

Jason writes humorous books, or so I've been told. I enjoy his Zoey Ashe books, and they are fun, but I've never found them to be particularly "funny." The Zoey Ashe series presents lots of absurd situations that entertained me, but none that really tickled my funny bone. However, Black Box of Doom made me laugh out loud multiple times. Maybe it's the fact that, unlike Zoey Ashe (which is science fiction), Black Box of Doom is set in "our world" in a way that feels incredibly true to life. And it feels like "our world" in a way that a lot of "real world" stories don't, largely thanks to the specificity.

Rendering the world we live in with high specificity is risky, because it's the sort of thing that is prone to "age rapidly," but I think that in 10 years, people will look back on this as an interesting period piece about 2020's culture. When Jason Pargin writes about TikTok, and Reddit, and Twitch, and the way the characters in his book engage with these platforms, you get a sense that he understands them deeply, and he is more interested in rendering them in high fidelity than he is in making a value judgment about them, or trying to poke fun at them. And yet, because he understands them so deeply, he also understands all of the things about them that are deeply funny and absurd, and so he can render those parts to great humorous effect without ever having to exaggerate. The moments of absurdity that manage to be pointed without feeling artificially "heightened" are some of the funniest, and give the book a very Dave Barry-esque quality.

Pargin ends the book with an afterward about karma how does not exist in this universe: this is a book where bad things can happen to people who behave well, and good things can happen to people who behave poorly. That much seems obvious enough that it seems unnecessary to explain it in a disclaimer, but Pargin wishes to disclaim something more specific: he wants us to know that if good things happen to a character, that is not a case of the author "rewarding" the character for being "right," nor are the bad things that happen to other characters in a case of Pargin "punishing" them for being "wrong."

Before editing this post, I wrote the previous paragraph about how "sometimes good things happen to bad people, and sometimes bad things happen to good people." But I rewrote those sentences, because I think that Pargin would reject the essentialist framing of "good person" vs "bad person." Everyone you know has done bad things at some point in their lives, and everyone you know has good qualities that might cause you to like them in certain contexts. Can anyone really make a judgment about whether that makes them a "good person" or "bad person?" If you go through someone's life looking for the one piece of evidence that will allow you to render a "good person or bad person" view of them, you will end up with a pretty low-fidelity picture of who they are, and a pretty low-fidelity picture of how the world works. All of the characters in this book do things that you probably don't approve of. Some of those things might even make you dislike them. But all of the characters in this book are fun to spend time with.

There are two interesting tricks that Jason Pargin pulls in Black Box of Doom that played with my expectations. One of which comes near the beginning, and one of which comes near the middle. Anyway, this is the part of the review where I get into descriptions that are specific enough to feel like spoilers.

First, the part that you learn as you read the first chapter:

Part of what Pargin does with his blurb is invite you to consider: what kind of man would be brave or desperate enough to accept someone offering $100,000 in cash to transport a mysterious black box across the country with no phone or GPS? What kind of hardened badass would accept a deal that is obviously pulling him into a world full of legally-questionable shenanigans and people who are obviously up to no good, with the confidence that he'd be able to handle himself in that hardscrabble world and come out alive?

And the answer is that the main character is none of those things. He's not brave; he's cowardly. He's not strong; he's weak. In fact, that's how he gets roped into this situation: he's anxiety-ridden. He's really bad with confrontation; he doesn't know how to handle conflict. And that is why he essentially allows himself to get bullied into participating in this insane errand: he doesn't know how to put his foot down and say "no." He tries to take the path of least resistance, basically procrastinating on the task of saying "I'm sorry, I can't help you," thinking "maybe if I go along with this, there will be a better opportunity for me to say no later," and of course once the ball gets rolling he can't stop it.

So, in a sense, the main character is kind of the opposite of who you think he would be based on the elevator pitch, and it's funny, and yet true-to-life, and makes for a story full of ways to put that socially-anxious guy into all sorts of crazy situations that he things are way beyond his capacity. And yet, of course, he deals with all of them, as best he can, because he must, and that's what most of life is.

Then there's something we find out partway through the story, closer to around the middle of the book.

You see, Jason Pargin has done yet another head fake with the main character, leading us to think one way before revealing something that feels almost the opposite. There is a real sense in which this story starts off with a poor put-upon guy who is roped into traveling across the country with a mysterious woman. You spend a good portion of the early part of the book fearing for his safety. He's here, but he doesn't particularly want to be here, and it's deeply unfortunate that he's stuck with the woman who roped him into this tense and chaotic mess.

But this is a road trip novel, and as the story goes on, you get a better sense of who these characters are, the cowardly driver, and the woman who hired him. You see more and more glimpses of the sort of people they are as they confront various situations. And, over time, you shift from feeling like he's deeply unfortunate to be stuck here with her (and gosh I'm terrified of what might happen to him if things go wrong), to starting to think about how deeply unfortunate she is to be stuck with him (and gosh I'm terrified of what might happen to her if things go wrong).

Just in the same way the blurb book invites us to think, "what kind of brave or desperate person would accept this insane business proposition," we're also left to contemplate, "what kind of brave, desperate person would offer this kind of insane business proposition?" What kind of woman would find herself in a situation where she was hailing a Lyft, and then ambushing the driver to tell him that she was ready to pay him six figures, in cash, to drive her and a box to the other end of the country?

That is one of many questions that is answered by the text of the book. I enjoyed discovering the answer, and many of the other answers we encounter along the way.

[artbyblastweave]

Reread John Dies At The End this weekend, and there’s this one bit that I think really encapsulates the whole vibe of the series. 

In the scene in Las Vegas, when they’re running from the teleporting wig monsters and the group has barricaded themselves behind a door while trying to work out a plan with Marconi, John offhandedly asks why the monsters are bothering to try and brute-force the door when they can just teleport instead. After he says this, the monsters outside stop pounding on the door and are heard murmuring amongst themselves, and the gag is that the monsters themselves didn’t even think to try that until they overheard John. This is actually a fairly boilerplate gag. I’ve seen gags along this line- the heroes accidentally reminding the monsters they’ve got an easy way in- multiple times.

Then one of the monsters immediately teleports in and kills Big Jim.

That’s not an incidental death. Over the course of the novel, Big Jim is revealed to have been one of the first people to figure out the full extent of what’s going on with Korrok’s invasion, he’s revealed to have stunning levels of insight into, and practical experience using the Soy Sauce, and his sister Amy- the last surviving member of the family following his death- is left vulnerable to exploitation by Korrok’s forces at least in part due to his absence, which forms the whole back-half of the novel. Even outside of plot relevance he’s a pretty fleshed-out figure in terms of how he relates to the community of Undisclosed and in John and Dave’s lives specifically. And now he’s dead. The one-off Scooby-doo style whacky-chase scene gag gives way to a genuinely colossal fuck-up on John’s part, a fuck-up with far-reaching implications that get brushed over in the heat of the moment because of the, you know, the incipient hell-fountain. But the innocuous gag mattered! John was careless and it bit him in the ass immediately. And all of the books are threaded through with examples of stock gags that abruptly mutate into something serious, or with heat-of-the-moment, easy-to-overlook fuckups by the protagonists that ripple forward and make the situation even harder to handle. This is such a good series

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[livingfictionsystem]

John Dies at the End be like

-Sparrow

[haveyoureadthishorrorbookpoll]

Have you read...

note: If you did not finish but feel you read enough to form an opinion, you may choose a ‘Yes’ option instead of 'Partly' (e.g., Yes, I didn’t like it). Interpret "neutral or complicated" however you like, I intended this category to be a broad option between like and dislike.

John Dies at the End is a comic lovecraftian horror novel written by Jason Pargin (aka David Wong) that was first published online as a webserial beginning in 2001, then as an edited manuscript in 2004, and a printed paperback in 2007, published by Permuted Press. STOP. You should not have touched this flyer 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 with the 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. 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 you keep one thing in mind: None of this was my fault.

submit a horror book!

[victusinveritas]

[run-a-goth-chick]

Every single novel by Jason Pargin has a moment where my stomach drops out. In "What the Hell Did I Just Read?", it's the moments after the car crash. In FV&FS, it's the lolcow reveal.

And oh boy, Big Black Box of Doom just hit me hard. Agent Key would be killing it in literally any other story. But this world, the real world, is so much stupider than that.

[silelda]

"See, one thing John had learned about the various creatures they'd faced over the years was that almost none of them liked being sawed in half by motorized metal teeth. Simple biology, really."

- "What the Hell Did I Just Read" by Jason Pargin

[burninglesbian]

I sketched my girl

[luffysfakebeard]

god we’ve all been there