Bullying, Be Gone!

There's a new book in the "John Dies At The End" series by Jason Pargin, coming out in November of this year. I can hardly wait! It's an amazing series. The new book is titled "There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs." This series is horror / scifi comedy. I got interested in the first book after seeing the movie made from it, and was instantly hooked. First book was, naturally, "John Dies At The End." Which is a bit misleading because John actually dies near the beginning of the book, his ghost literally haunting the narrative, and by the end of the book... well, let's just say John is in all four books so far.

This series is HIGHLY weird. Book one is about a drug called "soy sauce" because it looks like soy sauce; this drug basically pries your third eye all the way open and pins it in place so you can see all kinds of inter-dimensional monsters and other beings whether you want to or not, though it has numerous other potential horrifying side effects such as turning your body into a portal for inter-dimensional nasties to crawl through into our reality or -- as in the book -- killing you and letting your soul and mind haunt people (but you get better, if you're lucky). And that isn't even half of that book's insanity and weirdness!

"Soy sauce" also gives our two heroes and one heroine the permanent ability to see the inter-dimensional oddballs, so they and their town of Undisclosed become magnets for more weird things. (Though they do occasionally have to dose themselves again to amplify the effects to get more information.) In the second book, "This Book is Full of Spiders," the town is over-run by inter-dimensional spiders that go all face-hugger on your head and take over your body, but the only people who can actually see, hear, or feel these face-huggers are people who have taken "soy sauce" at some point in their lives and lived to tell the tale. The trio have to save the day before the US government, who have quarantined the town, decide to nuke the town to end the threat.

Book three is "What The Hell Did I Just Read?" And yeah, that's a pretty accurate description of how you feel after having read it. This one features a shape-shifting child-snatcher that can brainwash adults and is making it rain in Undisclosed. Like, "Biblical Flood" levels of rain, so that the rain is basically the main character for the whole book. I felt soggy most of the time I read this book. By the time it was over, I think my skin had turned prune-y. Excellent book, I highly recommend it.

The plot of "If This Book Exists, You're In The Wrong Universe" involves another inter-dimensional invasion, this time via a children's toy that is an egg that hatches horrible monsters that make people murder their family. The threat also involves time travel and an impending assimilation of our dimension by another in a way that threatens to rewrite the past and remake our dimension in their image.

And here is the blurb for "There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs." =

A massive, sticky pile of severed human limbs suddenly appears in the parking lot of a vacant department store in a desolate small town. A set of footprints are found trailing away in the snow, as if a single pair of bare feet had wandered off the pile. If this wasn’t puzzling enough, the cops soon find that no one seems to be missing the limbs. Some of the fingerprints on the severed arms belong to living people with all their appendages intact, others match no one on file, the rest of the limbs somehow have no prints at all.

This sounds like a case for local weirdos John, David and Amy, partly because the cops don’t want the headache and partly because David’s own arm is in the pile, despite an identical copy of it still being attached to his body. When a mysterious man then shows up at David’s home claiming to be in pursuit of an entity he calls “the Penetrator,” it seems clear the trio are in for a long weekend.

In addition to stopping whatever this nonsense is, the gang will also have to quell the panicked headlines that threaten to ensue, which could prompt the feds to try to just wipe the whole town off the map (again). As such, the first thing you need to know is that, contrary to whatever ugly rumors you may have heard, there are no giant crabs in this novel.

Seriously, the small town of Undisclosed kind of makes Sunnydale, California (home of the Hellmouth of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series) look tame by comparison.

I think the funniest part of the whole series is that John, David, and Amy are perhaps the most unlikely trio of heroes you could imagine. None of them know what they're doing at any time, they're constantly barely managing to even survive by the skin of their teeth, David wants nothing more than his normal boring job at the video rental store, John is a drug addict who bounces around from job to job, and book one's events only got resolved because Amy -- being an amputee -- was able to use the ghost of her hand to open a door that couldn't be opened any other way. There's more to what makes them unlikely heroes, but I don't remember all the details. I may have to re-read the series.

Yes, though I have had issues reading much of anything for a few years now, the "John Dies At The End" series is one of those series I have no trouble reading, it's just that good. And every book in the series is just so goddamned weird! I love it!

This one really scared me, once the twist was revealed, because I struggle to recognize faces, I can't tell one race from another most of the time, I am oblivious to what people are wearing unless it matches my own aesthetic, I don't know shit about most brand name products, I don't know shit about cars, my emotional responses to things are highly weird (low affect due to autism, an emotional cutoff valve in my brain that goes off if I get overwhelmed with any strong emotion -- IE a sort of breaker goes off in my head that gets rid of all emotion for a time, making me strangely calm in emergency situations -- and a tendency towards going mute under enough stress. Oh, and I have DID, so I'm prone to random changes of personality), and my memory is so poor that I can't even remember what I last ate an hour ago without a lot of thought and struggle. On top of all that, a good chunk of my long term memories tend to be stripped of the audio and visual parts and all that remains is the emotional context and the occasional mental summary of events. Oh, and my sense of time is so f%cked that the memories I do have are all out of order like someone's dumped dozens of LEGO sets into a toybox and shaken the box very vigorously, making finding anything specific very difficult. I even regularly forget random words I use every day.

So basically, I would make an absolutely worthless witness to a crime, even as a victim, since I wouldn't be able to remember anything useful (with the random things I would remember being a weird hodgepodge of whatever my mess of a brain would condescend to recall for me) like faces, names, car information (I sometimes even mix up what colors cars are sometimes), and clothes. (And I have about as much chance of remembering a license plate number as I do of winning the lottery twice in two days; hell, I can't even remember most three or four digit numbers for more than about four seconds at a time). So I can easily see myself ending up in a situation where everything that makes me highly weird could make me look very suspicious despite being entirely innocent. Fortunately, I do have decades of blog posts on multiple social media sites documenting these many oddities in detail, dating back to the late 90's, and an official diagnosis of autism (though not of my ADHD or my DID).