The End Has Come

     For starters, John Dies at the End was an amazing book. Literally, the best book I have ever read. I don't want to give any important plot points away, just in case you might go check this novel out for yourself, but the story is an insanely interesting, intriguing, creative, and hilarious piece of modern literature. I fully recommend this to anyone who is looking to read a less serious book with a lot of laughs, however keep in mind that if books had a rating, this one would definitely be rated R.

     I enjoyed this story for many reasons, one of them being the incredibly dynamic characters. The two main characters change dramatically over the course of the text. Dave, the narrator, is extremely apathetic towards everything in his boring life. The author makes it very easy to imagine him mumbling in a monotone voice everything that he says at the beginning. John, the other main character is a careless, irresponsible person with no direction in his life. In chapter 1 Dave says, "Basically, my daily life consists of going to my minimum wage job that I hate to pay the rent for my crappy, dilapidated apartment that I hate. Then every night John and I go to some party that sucks and talk to some boring people that suck. And repeat." However, their lives soon drastically change because of the street drug nicknamed Soy Sauce. Lots of people die and they go on a crazy adventure to other dimensions, but I won't spoil anything. At the end of the story, the two best friends become professional alien killers, which is just about the least boring job and life someone could ever have. No longer are they pessimists, and they live their lives to the fullest.

     The author also gave John Dies at the End a nice overall theme. That theme is Friendship. This is very present throughout the entire story and even when John dies, he and Dave still communicate and make each other laugh. They are always together and interacting in humorous ways, which makes the book so funny. This theme is not only a theme for this story, but also in countless others including "Spongebob Squarepants" and "Shrek."

      The author's writing style is my favorite part of the novel. Jason Pargin writes in a satirical manner that conveys Dave's thoughts as captivatingly strange and I just become enveloped in his thoughts. He also is very descriptive when he writes and I can imagine every detail of the ridiculous monsters in the story. One fun fact is that the word "bratwurst" is used in the story over 80 times, which just fascinates me.

     These reasons, and many more like the overwhelming amount of dark humor, make this my favorite book. I already want to read it again just to laugh a bunch more times and relive the extremely entertaining plot line.