First, I wrote a new article over at Cracked, on video game addiction and how you can build a game that keeps somebody playing long after they’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m pretty sure it applies to, uh, a fair number of us here.
Anyway, a little while ago I wound up with a box full of the rare Australian edition of my horror novel John Dies at the End…
…and offered to give them away (signed by me, even!) to whoever could write the best piece of short and hopefully erotic John Dies at the End fanfiction. You came through, and here are the winners:
The phone rang twice before John picked up. “Dave, it’s six in the morning. Is Amy dead?”
“It’s six in the evening. No, she’s at work. Molly’s walking on the ceiling, just the same since you were here last Sunday. Are you sure she didn’t get into the sauce?”
John made it clear he was annoyed. “You can’t wait until a reasonable hour to discuss this, Dave? By my count, I believe I told you a million times that, no, I kept the can in the shed. Molly did not eat the sauce. Why don’t you just take her to the vet?”
So one night, I’m plastered off my ass, drinking to forget, really, and I black out, and when I wake up? The silver box is open, empty, and the stuffed animals are all gathered around me, with Ted, the wombat, sitting on my chest and telling me that it’s about fucking time I woke up, where the fuck is breakfast? Zippy, the wallaby, Slim and Jim, the frilled lizards, Liar, the lyrebird, and Bobo the baboon, who’s doing this giant grin thing that shows off more teeth pointy than a stuffed animal should have.
So I made breakfast.
That is the entire comic.
THWAP!
Another bird. No, this one was actually a squirrel. I knew that because John said-
“Squirrel”
-without turning around to see the window. I looked, and sure enough there was now a little brown furry creature, lying on the small windowsill, barely moving. This time I noticed a few other spots on the window with some damage. Cracks in the glass littered the panes, and a few places were taped with a combination of duct and electrical tape, in order to keep them together. It looked like the place was being shot at, or the less likely scenario, that small animals were constantly hitting the window. I asked John about this.
“Oh, well, Dave ran over a dog, well it ran into the road and he hit it, and ever since then animals have been committing suicide around him. We haven’t quite figured it out.”
“The desert shimmered around us, nothing moving in the midday heat. As we walked, John started humming the overture to ‘Camel Holocaust’, the orchestrated version of which had recently been awarded the Best New Opera Prize at the biannual Viennese Opera and Chilli Cook-Off Festival, despite a rumoured voting scandal. He broke off humming at the start of the intermezzo.
“Dave, why are we here again?” he asked…
He looked down at the baggie. Crammed into the corner of this small sandwich bag was the blackest fucking weed I have ever seen. Again, I’m not an expert in this field, but I was almost certain that weed was supposed to have some semblance of a shade of green. My hands moved into position. I flicked the lighter to life. Just get a little hit, and be done with it, I figured. I moved the piece to my mouth. Back to the hotel room after this. Nice relaxing sleep. As the lighter got closer to the bowl, I prepared to take a tiny inhale. Scorching hot smoke shot into my lungs, WAY too much. Did I even get the flame onto the weed? Fuck. It was like drowning in boiling water. My eyes turned into faucets. I could feel the veins in my face bulge as I hacked and coughed. I looked up at Sean. He was looking down, smirking and glassy-eyed, at me as I was doubled over. I tried to say something along the lines of “Fuck you, shit-whistle” but nothing came. I think the two dealers were laughing. Then I… Well, shit, what happened then?
Only chunks of memory after that…
Imagine if you will, how you feel when sober, and how you feel when drunk. Now, imagine going from drunk to sober in an instant, and then going above sober, so that you’re anti-drunk, and then above that, again and again and again, until you’re so sober, you’re almost at the point where you’ve reached drunkenness from the opposite side.
That is what I felt, and in an instant I could tell the story about every object in the room around me. The chair I was sitting in, although purporting to be Australian made, was actually made in Taiwan. The paint on the walls isn’t actually “Vanilla Sunset” but “Twilight Orange”. And James, sitting right in front of me, isn’t actually human.
“Honestly officer, they were dead when we got here”. John said nonchalantly, as if he wasn’t aware of the ramifications of what he just said.
The officer sauntered around the abandoned car, peering in through the dusty windows upon the bloody custard the car’s occupants had been reduced to.
“You chaps mind running through that story one more time, kindly?” The officer scratched at his scalp with the edge of his pen and didn’t take his notebook out of his pocket.
“There were rabbits.” I started, piecing together the bloody mess that the past half-hour had become. I kicked at a stain on the earth where a twelve-legged furry abomination dragged a still-kicking pair of legs back down into whatever labyrinthine Hell it emerged from. “I’m no rabbit biologist, but I’d say there was probably a fuckton of rabbits, Officer. I don’t know metric units, so-”
This Australian Guy Smells Like Turds, by Ethan Cottle:
“Hey,” I said, waving the canister like a toy in front of him, “This is yours. Take it,” I tossed the canister at his feet. His face went slack and for a second I was haunted by an image of this freak leaping on top of me and ripping my throat out. Instead, he leaned down, farted, and began to bury the canister in this tiny hole. He sat his bony ass on the fresh hole and looked at me, gesturing at a spot in front of him, “Sit.”
“Uh, right. Later,” I started for my car.
“Boy! You’ll get jumped!”
Just when he shouted at me there was this piercing screech and running around my car was this huge bird, cocking its head between me and the car as it suddenly changed course and charged at me, screaming its head off. I bolted the other direction, not even thinking of looking back at the bird as it chased me. Governor was beating his hands on the ground, hooting madly as I slid on my ass in front of him.
Dave checked his waterproof watch and looked around. Nothing but desert in every direction. Nothing, that is, except for the ramshackle haunted hut. To the untrained eye it looked like any other ramshackle hut, but Dan was a professional ghostologist and he knew haunted when he saw it. He checked his watch again and sighed. There was a glint of light on the horizon. A dust cloud of an approaching vehicle.
The three wheeled motorcycle looked like it had been put together by blind, lazy Aborigines, and the rider didn’t look much better. Jake Cheddar backflipped from the motorcycle, his feather studded chaps glinting in the light, his pink Mohawk making him look like some kind of exotic bird that they undoubtedly have in Australia probably.
‘Wallawalla dingdon, mate.’ He said.
‘Where’ve you been, mate?’ Said Dan.
Jake shrugged. ‘No doubt surfing or some such.’
‘In the desert?’
‘Probably. Now, how haunted is this shack then?’
‘I’d give it a ten point five on the spookometer. If I had one.’
Each of you need to send me your name and mailing address so you can collect your winnings: davidwong@johndiesattheend.com
I’ll be back with a new update soon, in the mean time:
You can meet me in person if you’ll be in the Atlanta area next month. I’m giving a talk at JordanCon, a fantasy book convention about my ridiculous, roundabout path to getting my book published. It will be held at the Crowne Plaza Ravinia at Perimeter April 23-25th in Atlanta, GA.
Otherwise, find me on:
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March 7th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
[...] John Dies at the End » Erotic Horror Fanfiction and Valuable Prizes Says: March 7th, 2010 at 3:42 pm [...]
March 9th, 2010 at 1:31 am
GODDAMNIT.
I’m in Atlanta NOW. I’ll be in friggin’ New Mexico when you’re here. Good job Dave, very considerate.
April 30th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
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