Who first came up with the strange notion of combining horror and comedy? Try counting the jokes in an H.P. Lovecraft story, and you won’t even get into the low single digits. Bram Stoker doesn’t give Count Dracula any witty one-liners, and Mary Shelley makes her Frankenstein monster almost exactly like a real human, except for the noticeably absent sense of humor. Nor do you find this mixture in Edgar Allan Poe . Poe wrote some comic sketches and stories (not very well, I must add), but never tried to add humor to his scary tales.
Yet when Roger Corman was making his Edgar Allan Poe movies more than a century later, he discovered that audiences responded favorably to humorous elements. You can actually trace his learning curve over the course of his eight Poe films—the early efforts stay close to horror film formulas, but Corman gradually learned that comic ingredients enhanced the audience appeal of his movies. When he first embarked on these films, the director had viewed Poe’s oeuvre as an platform for a more psychological approach to horror. “I felt that Poe and Freud had been working in different ways toward a concept of the unconscious mind,” he later explained. But by the time he had arrived at The Raven (1963), Corman had settled on a different approach, filled with dark humor, and enlivened by the comic talents of his actors, especially the combo of Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson, who were cast as unlikely father and son in a film that became the most profitable of the Poe films to that date. Later horror film directors learned from Corman’s example.
But I can’t give Corman credit for inventing the comedy and horror combination. The real launching pad—at least within the confines of Hollywood—had come fifteen years earlier with Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein (1948). This film was Universal Pictures' rule-breaking attempt to instill new life into its flagging monster movie franchise with the addition of the hottest comedy duo of the era. The film proved so successful that the studio cooked up low-quality sequels matching the comedians with the Mummy, the Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These films will never show up on a list of cinematic masterpieces, but they helped define formulas that still can be found in current-day cinematic offerings.
Yet the most relevant antecedent to my present subject, the novel John Dies at the End , is none of these, but rather the distinctive style of slacker horror comedy associated with the Ghostbusters franchise. Here the comedy is often deadpan and rude, the heroes not even valiant enough to qualify as anti-heroes. They are people who deal with supernatural phenomena because they don’t have the skills to get a better job. They confront monsters, but invariably the supernatural creatures are ridiculous ones, outlandish characters who themselves would be seen as losers in this monster world. Instead of a mesmerizing Count Dracula, we have a huge marshmallow man.
Jason Pargin, writing under the name David Wong, captures precisely this tone and ambiance in John Dies at the End. His protagonists, two buddies John and Dave (yes, the same Dave Wong who is ostensibly the author of the book) are deadbeats who can't even fulfill their meager responsibilities as clerks in a second-rate video rental store. Most of the clients really ought to go to the Blockbuster outlet down the street.
But the monsters John and Dave battle are an even more pathetic bunch. In the course of this novel, readers will encounter a creature made of assorted pieces of meat, a demented Ronald McDonald display figure come to life, a gorilla riding a giant crab, and an angry figure on the inside of a television pounding on the screen in an attempt to break out of the box. For variety, Pargin mixes in spiders, snakes, cockroaches, and always in large quantities. Even Moses never mustered so many swarms and plagues. For a change up, Wong dishes out shadow people, astral projections, and a variety of smart (and occasionally cute) animals.
The plot advances with all of the subtlety of a wacko video game. When Dave and John overcome one creepy monster, they don’t get much time to celebrate before another more disgusting one arrives on the scene. I’ve never read a novel with more bizarre scenes, but unlike other books that involve surprising happenings, this one skips over the boring parts in which the author explains what just took place. If you are inclined to ask hard questions—such as "Why did those meat products form together into a human- shape and go on the rampage?" or "Why was the gorilla riding on top of a giant crab?"—this is not the book for you. You won’t get answers, just more oddities in the pages ahead.
By any normal standards—for example, those taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop— this novel must be considered another loser, along with Dave and John and their stink- up-the-place adversaries from an abandoned abattoir. Yet this book somehow works, despite the glaring gaps and inconsistencies. Indeed, you might even call it the defining work of slacker horror fiction—although that label raises the disturbing thought that publishing imprints might give us more such stories in the future.
In any event, it’s a lowbrow, populist masterwork, not dissimilar to the aforementioned Ghostbusters, or Mel Brooks’s zanier films, or the narratives of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. In such efforts, you don’t seek tightly-controlled plots and multiple levels of symbolism. You are given spectacles and laughs and a can-you-top-this series of scenes and set pieces. Genre conventions are used and abused, delicate sensibilities are tweaked, and audience outrage invited at every turn. For those who require trigger warnings, a new one would be needed every sixty seconds, more or less.
Writing of this sort seems to invite disdain. You can almost hear ' Dave Wong' muttering to himself behind the scenes: “Take your literary standards and use them to clean up dog droppings.” In fact, he may even use those exact words at some point in this novel. But it’s harder to write a successful book of this sort than you might think. Without the benefit of coherence and character development, the author always operates on a tightrope. Each page must deliver something funny or striking. The readers may be suckers, but the author has to be a P.T. Barnum suckering them in at every step with marvels and amusements. Many storytellers have attempted to write campy and eccentric books of this sort, and have pratfallen prone on their proboscis.
But 'Dave Wong' (aka Jason Pargin) somehow manages to pull it off. He is, I’m forced to admit, one of the more adept comic writers around, and displays a mastery of all the building blocks of humorous fiction—understatement, overstatement, puns, one-liners, misdirection, slapstick, parody, etc. I’m not sure where he learned these skills. When he wrote John Dies at the End , he was working as copy editor at a law firm, where his responsibilities included scrutinizing the text of insurance claims. This isn't exactly a Harvard Lampoon apprenticeship.
I started reading this novel as a skeptic. I hesitated even before buying it. The cover and the blurbs seemed targeted at fraternity wastoids. Even the praise of the book’s fans made me apprehensive. ("It is like an H.P. Lovecraft tale if Lovecraft were into poop and fart jokes.") With enthusiastic friends like these, who needs enemies? But Pargin delivers the goods, page after page, and with enough consistency to keep the reader turning the pages.
Yes, Poe would have been outraged. Lovecraft would have scorned it. Bram Stoker would have shot it with a silver bullet, and maybe even hammered a stake into the middle of the cover for good measure. But don’t let reasonable people dissuade you from reading this book. What do reasonable people know about slacker horror, anyway? This novel is the slackest of them all, and likely to remain so until pigs sprout wings and hell freezes over—both of which I expect in Wong ' s sequel.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
Poe would have been outraged. Lovecraft would have scorned it. Bram Stoker would have shot it with a silver bullet, and maybe even hammered a stake into the middle of the cover for good measure.