Wordy Wednesday – This Book is Full of Spiders by David Wong

The book isn’t the only thing that is filled with spiders. Ah, near-spoiler alert!

This will be a short review.

Go buy This Book is Full of Spiders. It is a fantastic novel. Here is the website for it and the first book.

The sequel to John Dies at the End, this book is one of those rare novels that kept me up late, reading long into the early hours of the morning. Not too often, though, because I read it all in two days.

The characters are excellent and you’ll really feel for them. The pacing is perfect, starting off at a quick trot and using a good fast-and-slow rhythm that pulls you along. There are big ideas here, and they are well-fleshed out. The writing is spot-on, exactly what it needs to be for the situation.

Anything I want to say might be a spoiler. It’s a wonderful blend of survival horror, philosophical debate, grey moral questions, and humor both childish and mature.

Okay okay I’ll do just a little review. Dave and his friend John once took a drug called Soy Sauce. Now they can see things other people can’t. That shadow you think you saw move just before you turned your head? Yeah, that was a walking shadow. Probably didn’t have your best interests at heart, either.

Well, Dave and John now find themselves entangled with a spider-thing from another dimension. Don’t be scared. It just wants to crawl into your mouth and live in you.

Unlike in John Dies at the End, things spiral way out of control this time. The small Midwestern town of Undisclosed is quickly the staging point for an alien invasion. Dave is a person of interest – the invasion, after all, started in his house.

Things get dark.

The ending almost made me hate David Wong (the author, who is actually Jason Pargin writing as if he were the David Wong of the book – I explain it dumb. You know what I mean). But This Book is Full of Spiders is our ages’ Cthulhu Mythos. I honestly believe it is that powerful. Pargin has built a shadow-world that exists beside us, even though we are blind to most of it.

And holy shit it is so believable, go buy this and read it right now I want to talk to people about it and no one I know has fucking read it GO GO GOOOOOO!