The John Dies at the End series is interesting because you can read the books in any order and still understand what’s going on. This Book is Full of Spiders is the second book in the series. In this book, two college dropouts took Soy Sauce (a drug) a while back and now they can see the things. The things include the Shadow Men, the blood, Maggie and the spiders that crawl into your body and take it over so you have to fight against your own body to gain the smallest bit of control. No one else can see them. Just David and John and whoever else took the Sauce. Due to the spiders, there’s a pandemic going on, and no one knows what the virus is, just that it will start tearing off your flesh in a way that it looks like it’s eating you, cause it is. It’s the spiders. Remember that normal people can’t see them. They are very hungry and really want to take over people for reasons that I forgot but you’ll find out by reading. So, as one normally does, people start recording and posting what’s going on in [Undisclosed] and eventually this is seen as a zombie apocalypse because the spiders are also taking over your dead best friend.
I’m aware that my description of the book isn’t very lighthearted or made the book sound like a comedy. It is though, many reviews compare it to Douglas Adams’ The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you haven’t read, is hilarious. Also, if you’re into this sort of thing, it’s based on Dunbar’s number and it's the author’s favorite book of the series. If that hasn’t sold it to you, there’s also a life saving dog called Molly. You also get a brief POV from her. There is also a POV of John and Amy (David’s girlfriend), but these work differently as they aren’t in first person. The book is written as if David was writing about his experience in this pandemic within [Undisclosed]. There’s also this weird part at the beginning that’s hard to understand without context. Jason Pargin, the author, originally wrote this series under the name David Wong, so it really felt that David was sharing his life-experience. At the beginning of the book, it briefly mentions having the name David Wong on the cover, it’s not very important but now you know why it doesn’t say that. Jason Pargin changed his pen name.
I loved this book and basically spent all of my freetime reading it. I loved the jokes, the suspense, the dog, the attitude, the weird shenanigans that John gets up to to save David, all of it. If I could, I would erase my knowledge of reading this book so I can see it all unfold again without knowing what’s coming next.
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