Hedrigall posted:This Book Is Full Of Spiders by David Wong. I've just finished this, too. As a big fan of JDaTE, I honestly thought the sequel was, well... poo poo. You can tell that David Wong has changed hugely between the time he wrote the first novel and this one. There's nothing wrong with that. But the tonal shift between 'two weird guys gently caress up continually and inexplicably save the universe' and 'two weird guys gently caress up and make everything worse again and again' is utterly baffling. The humour is practically absent entirely. JDaTE made me laugh out loud repeatedly throughout the entire book. Spiders... like, I could tell it was trying to be funny but I never actually laughed. That might have been because the characters are different. It's like he tried to ground them. Dave goes from self-depreciating and witty to just incredibly depressed. John goes from an oddball badass character to, well, a drunk idiot. Amy is the only one who seems to be anything like herself but she still seems shallow, vapid and without her previous quirky charm. Even Molly, the dog, doesn't feel like she's the same one from the first novel - does anyone remember the 'dogging you' comment? These characters were endearing in the first book and the more negative aspects felt like they were magnified by Dave's status as an unreliable narrator. In Spiders, I disliked them. Not just because how they've become banal and horrible, but they also have gone from pro-active to reactive. I also thought that the POV going from Dave to the other characters wasn't needed. Part of the appeal of the first book is that you only got David's version of events. It's a sequel and yet barely anything is carried over from the first novel. The big plot point of David (first novel spoilers) not being human is absent entirely as are any of the dangling plot hooks that were not resolved in the first novel. The only thing that really seems to link it is the Shadowmen - who barely show up and don't really do anything. The book is haphazard. He's kept a lot of things from Temple, the original draft that he put on his website, without really altering them. You can tell which bits were written back then and which ones have come through more recently. A lot of it seems to have been kept without any regard to how it fits in or works with the new parts. I thought the ending was cheap. I wanted to like it, really, I did. The problem is, it almost feels like fanfiction. It feels like if someone wanted to create a 'grimdark' fanfic version of JDaTE. John is there, Dave is there, Amy is there, Molly is there, the Shadowpeople are there... but it feels so weird and not-quite-right that it just leaves you wholly dissatisfied. It's like none of the plot elements from the first book are touched upon because the writer doesn't want to risk breaking 'canon' when/if the original author clarifies things. And then you realise that Spiders was written by the original author. Oh... Two out of five, I think, and that might be being generous. Honestly, I can't recommend it.
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Nov 8, 2012 13:54
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Deep Winter posted:I just finished This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously dude, don't touch it) by cracked.coms David Wong. Not as good as John Dies at the End, but still a great, funny book. I really want to see a discussion thread on this book. I was very disappointed with it, as was most people I know. I'd love to see a defense of it because it is just such a different novel to the first. It's barely a sequel.
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Dec 7, 2012 01:41
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The Rage of Achilles -- Terrence Hawkins' "gritty" retelling of the Iliad sometimes felt like it was getting almost parodic with how anachronistic some of the dialogue is, but it is generally entertaining. However, what is really interesting is his usage of the Bicameral Mind theory: the hallucinations of the gods speaking to the various characters are great, Odysseus as the first man to realize he's capable of hearing himself think is a highlight, as is Achilles' journey from one to the other. You just need to look past the sex, dicks, whores, etc. "grittiness." Ready, Okay! -- I only recently got around to reading Adam Cadre's debut and only novel. It is, unfortunately, sluggish and over-long. That said, it is also an interesting clockwork mechanism where everything has a deliberate point to it. Problem is, you spend about 90% of the book sifting gems out of dirt and waiting to get to the fireworks factory that was promised on the very first page, but when you do and everything comes together, it is great. What blows my mind about Ready, Okay! is that it feels like a pointed "deconstruction" of John Green's reified sadboy YA genre by way of Bowling for Columbine... years before either thing existed. Like, that is how you'd pitch this beast: Looking for Alaska meets Bowling for Columbine. Did Adam Cadre send this book back in time? Was the biggest mistake he made releasing this book like a decade early? I don't know if I can call it a good book or even one I enjoyed reading, but it's certainly unique and audacious. Think of a John Green novel with all the usual tropes and the quippy introvert nice guy protagonist but where the protagonist's zany family is the result of unsupported mental illnesses and generational trauma, you spend 400 pages getting to know a wide cast of teenagers with issues and varying degrees of sympathy, good and bad, and then every single one of them dies in a school shooting that is the explicit result of them being failed by every authority figure and institution that was supposed to protect them. It's absolutely wild. It's one of those five stars for ambition and ideas, two stars for execution books. You can easily see why it flopped when it was released by HarperCollins back in the day, but you kind of wish it was a hit bigger than it was.
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Mar 27, 2024 07:49
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