John Dies at the End (2007)

John Dies at the End is a cosmic Lovecraftian horror novel by Jason Pargin, under the pseudonym David Wong. It was first published online as a webserial beginning in 2001, then as an edited manuscript in 2004, and a printed paperback in 2007, published by Permuted Press. An estimated 70,000 people read the free online versions before they were removed in September 2008. Thomas Dunne Books published the story with additional material as a hardcover on September 29, 2009. The book was followed by three sequels, This Book Is Full of Spiders in 2012, What The Hell Did I Just Read in 2017, and If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe, in 2022. A film adaptation by Don Coscarelli was released in 2012.

Plot

David and John are a pair of paranormal investigators who live in an unnamed Midwestern town (referred to in the novel as "Undisclosed"). Dave meets reporter Arnie in a local restaurant and recounts the origin of his and John's unusual abilities.

The main story begins with David and John at a party, where John is performing with his band, Three Arm Sally. David leaves the party early after a confrontation with an "amateur magician" who seemed to have real supernatural powers, leaving him shaken. David goes home with an Irish Setter named Molly, which seems to have selected him as her new owner. David is awakened in the middle of the night by a call from John, asking that he come save him from something in his apartment. David meets up with John at his apartment and saves John from a "monster" that David can't see. They then go to Denny's, where John reveals that he has taken a drug known as "soy sauce". John shows David a syringe containing the drug, which he was given by the magician, who told John his name is "Robert Marley". David pockets the syringe. Later, David accidentally injects himself with the drug in his pocket and begins to feel the effects.

Local police detective Lawrence Appleton informs David that everyone from the party except himself are either dead or missing, which turns out not to be true. While David is being interrogated, Appleton and David are informed that John has died in the other room, causing Appleton to leave David alone in the interrogation room. Mysteriously, David receives a call from John urging him to escape custody in the chaos that has ensued from him flatlining in the other room. After a brief fight with a demon masquerading as an officer, David follows the instructions of the John on the phone to go to the trailer home of Robert Marley. While there, David sees a TV displaying the last moments of Robert Marley: he explodes into a massive swarm of flying, wingless bugs that look like grains of rice. These bugs then fly over to someone else that came from the party and dig into them, apparently possessing them. Appleton arrives shortly after David to burn down the trailer, gripped with the desire to purge the town of the evil he believes has come. He leaves David for dead after shooting him in the chest with a defective bullet, then leaves. David is rescued by Molly driving his car through the wall of the trailer. Shortly after, Molly begins to "speak" in the voice of John, which urges David to go to Vegas to seek out Albert Marconi.

David goes home to wash up and change clothes. After leaving the shower, David finds the man who had been possessed by the bugs that were once in Marley. He/it tells David to call him Shitload because "there's a shitload of us in here." After surviving multiple gunshots, Shitload kidnaps David, who is knocked unconscious after Shitload repeatedly punches him in the balls. David wakes up in the back of a liquor truck with John and other survivors of the party and they seem to be headed to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas to meet with Albert Marconi, an expert in the paranormal. En route to Las Vegas, Detective Appleton rescues the group from Shitload. Shortly after, he explodes into a swarm of the white bugs, which possess one of the other survivors, forcing David to kill and burn their body.

A climactic battle scene takes place at the Luxor and involves many strange scorpion monsters and a portal into what is apparently Hell that unleashes several entities called Shadow People. Marconi closes the portal, and John and David return home and resume their lives.

One year later, Dave and John begin investigating various strange phenomena, all caused by the Shadow Men. David alone is haunted by messages from a "Korrok," who harbors seeming ill will towards David, and is somehow orchestrating much of the phenomena. Eventually, David and John are called to the home of Molly's previous owner and one of the survivors who died in the Luxor, "Big" Jim Sullivan, to investigate the disappearance of Jim's sister, Amy. Amy disappeared from behind a locked door with no other entrances. After Amy reappears, David and John take more soy sauce to gain the supernatural awareness that they feel they need to confront the source of the Shadow Men and stop them for good. They then build a bomb, which is accidentally eaten by Molly. After tracking the Shadow Men to an abandoned mall, John and Dave are transported to another dimension, where they are greeted by followers of a godlike being called Korrok, who commands the Shadow Men in a bid to conquer all possible universes for consumption and amusement via acts of mass genocide and torture. They are informed that, through their use of the Soy Sauce, they are now the chosen vectors through which the Shadow Men will invade their world. Escaping their captors, the two flee with Molly just as the bomb detonates.

An incredulous Arnie refuses to believe Dave, even after being shown one of the monsters the Shadow Men summoned. After Arnie tells a story about his younger years of being a reporter where a cop called him a nigger, David realizes that Arnie, whom he sees as a white man, must be manifesting as a ghost. David reveals the real Arnie dead in the trunk of Arnie's rental car. Arnie panics and disappears.