• Reading

    Review: John Dies at the End

    John Dies at the End
    John Dies at the End by David Wong
    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    This book was just freakin’ weird. That is the only word that suffices. Gross, horrific, and disgusting in about equal measure, it was also funny as hell and kept me glued to the pages from start to end. (It was kind of uncomfortable, actually.)

    I’m not even sure how to review this thing without spoiling it. There’s this guy named David Wong, and his friend John. They . . . hunt monsters. Like this one monster that’s made of meat. Not in the way that you or I are made of meat, but in a more literal way. Like, it’s a monster . . . made of meat. Like, meat from a freezer, all held together in a disgusting way by a supernatural power of evil.

    Which can be vanquished, apparently, by really loud, heavy metal music played on a boom box. Or mint candies with bible verses printed on them.

    And there’s a dog named Molly who both is and isn’t a dog. Who can sometimes levitate and talk. Of course, all she says is something about Korrok.

    Korrok . . . that would be the big, supernatural evil. Kind of. It’s complicated.

    I’m making kind of a mess of this, aren’t I?

    Um. There’s also a girl. More than one, actually. Jennifer Lopez and Amy. No, not that Jennifer Lopez. The less said about her, the better.

    Amy, though . . . she’s the kind of girl who disappears from inside a locked room for several hours every night, to be replaced by a bag of what looks like fat. And a giant, levitating jelly-fish. Of evil. Only she doesn’t remember where she went.

    Look, just read it. Seriously. I . . . just read it.

    Go.

    View all my reviews

  • Meta,  Writing

    I Should Be Stopped

    Insane by fraleyla, on Flickr
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License  by  fraleyla 

    I’m trying to design some business cards for WorldCon later this year. I’ve got it down to a couple of designs, the only difference being how the picture of me is oriented with relation to the text, which consists of my email, Twitter, Facebook, and website addresses (that would be here).

    Both of them have a picture of me (different pictures), and underneath the image it has my name in full, and underneath that, my Twitter bio, which is this.

    Creator and Destroyer of Worlds

    But a couple of days ago in a chat with a friend of mine, I said the following.

    I invent imaginary people and make them have conversations in my head. I also write.

    I don’t know why, but I find this quite funny. My friend, it must be noted, neither laughed nor even reacted, but that is probably because she expects these kind of statements out of me, and believes that any reaction — positive or negative — could be taken as encouragement.

    Is it just me, or is that better than Creator and Destroyer of Worlds? It’s a big longer, but . . . maybe I could make it work. I don’t know.

    What do you think?