Bookish Thoughts

I read the sequel to this book, This Book is Full of Spiders , a few years ago. I liked it fine. People tend to get fanatically devoted to these books, and I felt like the sequel didn't live up to the hype. I enjoyed it but not as much as I'd expected to. Still, when I saw the first one at a library sale, I felt like it was worth picking up. That was a mistake. Sure, this book is a head trip of a horror novel. It combines absurdity with out-of-nowhere plot twists to keep the reader feeling off balance. And that's all find and good. The problem is the rampant immaturity in this book. I think it's partially on purpose. The guys tasked with saving the world are woefully unprepared, and that's where some of the humor comes from. They're twenty-something slackers who act like they're still in high school. By which I mean that the protagonists of YA novels tend to be more thoughtful and level-headed than these two. What really got to me were the frequent slu...

David Wong's  This Book is Full of Spiders  is technically a sequel to  John Dies at the End . I haven't read the first one, but I really don't think you need to. In fact, the first page of the spider book tells the reader to just ignore everything that happened in the first book. The only confusing bit was that John was in this book, alive and kicking and drinking way too much. So he probably didn't actually die, which makes that first title rather misleading. The second title, though, is not in any way misleading. This book is all about spiders. Many-legged, alien parasites that zombify their victims while they breed and search for new victims. The book plays out like a typical zombie narrative in three acts. The first act counts down to the outbreak, the second to a massacre, and the third to a last-ditch effort to contain the threat by bombing an entire town off the map. Like you do. Our heroes, David, John, David's girlfriend Amy, and her dog Molly try thei...