REVIEW: ‘This Book is Full of Spiders’ by David Wong

With a cinematic release for the film adaptation of David Wong’s John Dies at the End just around the corner (January 25th in the US, March 22nd in the UK), now seems the perfect time to review This Book is Full of Spiders (TBIFOS), Wong’s sequel to that astonishingly good debut novel.  Like the first book, TBIFOS chronicles the adventures of hapless but not entirely hopeless best friends and amateur monster-hunters, John and Dave (along with Dave’s girlfriend Amy and her dog Molly), and Wong has once again concocted a potent mixture of horror, action and comedy which sees his slacker heroes take on zombies, shadow men, apocalyptic conspiracies and of course the eponymous giant spiders.  Unlike the first book, though, which featured a number of shorter stories, TBIFOS consists of a single tale, epic in scope, concerning the invasion and subsequent contamination of John and Dave’s home town by a swarm of inter-dimensional spider monsters that turn people into shape-shifting zombies.

If that last sentence sounds strange to you, then you’re evidently not yet familiar enough with the scary, exciting and just downright weird world of John and Dave, a world well-captured in the book’s trailer, which those of an arachnophobic disposition should probably avoid watching:

A lazy way of describing Wong’s writing would be to say that it’s like Douglas Adams meets H.P. Lovecraft, yet I can’t think of a more accurate comparison.  There are moments of surreal humour counterbalanced by genuinely awful horror, and TBIFOS, just like its predecessor, is a book that scares as much as it amuses.  If anything, this sequel is darker still than John Dies at the End; the sense of fun which characterised the first book is somewhat tempered here by a much bleaker worldview which has also been evident in some of Wong’s recent articles for Cracked.com.  At times, the author seems at pains to emphasise the brutal fact that, no matter how hard you try or how just your cause, people are still going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it.  Whenever John, Dave, Amy and Molly do gain the upper hand, it seems as much a result of dumb luck as any effort on their part, and often appears to be little more than a temporary victory in their endless struggle against the encroaching darkness.

Over the course of the book, every main character is put through the metaphorical wringer, and the effects of this harrowing ordeal are actually most noticeable in the character of John.  In the first book, John had the manner of a B-movie action hero, able to face any adversary or situation – no matter how ludicrous and horrifying – with a corny quip and a headlong charge.  He was the perfect opponent for inter-dimensional demonspawn, a spiritual successor to Ash Williams and Jack Burton, whose own inherent ridiculousness made him the perfect fit for a world suddenly turned ridiculous.  While the character retains these qualities in TBIFOS, Wong also chooses to humanise John in a way that dilutes them.  For the first time, John’s bravado and seemingly inexhaustible supply of one-liners begin to look like bluster designed to conceal his own fear and helplessness.  In this way he seems to represent the book as a whole, the character’s emotional turmoil being used by Wong to convey the idea that monster-hunting is all fun and games until someone’s possessed by a hideous spider parasite and forced to murder their family and friends in front of you.

Despite this darkness of tone, however, This Book is Full of Spiders is far from an unrelenting gloomfest.  The action unfolds at the sort of thrilling pace that will keep you gripped until the wee small hours, and Wong’s talent for weird humour ensures that there are dozens of laugh-out-loud moments throughout the book, sometimes when you least expect them.  Just as with his previous novel, the author also has fun with the concept of the unreliable narrator; the books are written in first-person perspective by a character called David Wong, ostensibly as a journal of actual occurrences, and there are several moments throughout the narrative (and one telling exchange in the epilogue) where the reader is forced to question how much of what they’re reading actually transpires within the confines of the story, confirming that Wong still has a mischievous streak.  Above all, the writing here shows evidence of an author maturing without losing the sense of wild adventure that made him such a joy to read the first time around, and despite its often dark subject matter, This Book is Full of Spiders is a hugely fun read.  Easily one of my books of last year.