Frequently Asked Questions

What the Hell is "John Dies at the End?"

It's a comic horror story I wrote, originally online but since picked up by a publisher.

Good, I like comics. Did you do the art yourself?

What? Oh, no. Not comic as in "Batman." Comic as in "Carlos Mencia." The story is alternately funny and grotesque, in ways that several hundred people claim to have never seen before.

Well congratu-fucking-lations. My little sister writes Harry Potter fan fiction, maybe you two can get together. Why the hell should I care about this thing some amateur wrote?

Well... this one has been read by more than 50,000 people online, and is being made into a movie by Don Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep).

Wow. Fifty whole thousand. You know, I've seen YouTube videos of toddlers farting the alphabet that got that many hits in one hour. Maybe they should all get movie deals.

Well, you've gotta admit, getting 50,000 random web surfers to finish all 150,000 words of an online novel is something. That's a lot of hours and a lot of staring I've asked these people to invest.

I will admit no such thing.

Do you have any more questions, sir?

I don't know. What's this book about?

Here's the blurb from the back cover:

_______________________

It's a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human.

Suddenly a silent, otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs.

Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity?

No. No, they can't.

_______________________

That about covers it.

Wait a second... haven't I heard of you? Do you run another website? The one where guys drive around in a van and try to get skanky girls to have sex with them on camera?

No, but I did run the humor site Pointless Waste of Time from 1999 until 2007, at which point I merged operations with Cracked.com. I now work there full time as their Assistant Editor. Maybe you should go check it out.

No, thanks. I guess I was thinking of someone else.

Any more questions?

No. In fact, every word you type consumes my will to live one byte at a time.

That's a very good question. JDatE first came about on Halloween of 2001, when I broke from the normal format of my aforementioned humor site and wrote a spooky little short story to entertain my readers for the holiday. It was about John and Dave and their battle in a haunted house with a poltergeist haunting a couple hundred pounds of raw meat.

I followed it up with short little installments every year after that, and by 2004 the annual Halloween scary stories were the highlight of the PWoT year. Nothing generated as much fan mail.

After the 2004 edition, I had wrapped up the story and ended up with a novel-length tale. I named it John Dies at the End.

In 2006 I started a sequel.

What, so it's written in little chunks?

Yes, it's widely believed that's one reason why it became popular. You don't need 20 free hours to plow through it. You can read a bit, then come back later if you feel like it. It's all separated out so you can just bookmark where you left off.

Okay, I've been to your site and when I go to the forums, I see guys posting as "David Wong" and "John Cheese." Those are the main characters of your story, right? So who are those guys?

"David Wong" and "John Cheese" actually came about before JDatE. When I started that humor site way back when, those are the user ID's me and my best friend came up with.

When I started writing JDatE later, it seemed natural to make those two characters we created the stars.

So there really is a "John Cheese?"

No person like that could ever actually exist. He's the overblown, comedy version of my real-life friend.

He has a whole website of his own HERE

So give me one good reason why I should start my long journey toward utter insanity.

It's free, for the time being.