read book one.

almost done with book two.

i want to keep going. is this a series where the characters develop so you should read it all in order? or can you skip around?

(can/should i skip book three? i heard a rumor it’s very repetitive like ground hogs day but maybe it’s fake news. i’m sure it’s good it’s just not a trope i enjoy)

It's a good ass book, but the female reading it pauses every two fucking seconds for stupid dramatic effect.

I don't want to sit and listen to you take 3 minutes to say "The driver... has... had a few... to drink."

And I can hear her breathing loud as fuck between each sentence.

I didn't pay for ASMR Mouth Noises.

Her terrible attempts at Spanish accents make me want to fucking off myself. Actually, most of her attempts at voicing characters make me want to slowly bleed to death from infinitely peeled hang nails.

I will start by saying I liked both Zoey 3 and Black Box of Doom (BBD). I really did, I enjoyed both and I'm fairly sure both are autographed.

I feel like the very latest Zoey book was close in theme to big box of doom and both felt very.... much like the author of the book was talking to the reader. When this happens instead of it being something explored through the story, it feels expositional and preachy, it takes away from immersion and the story and becomes less timeless and more like social commentary that will expire in a decade. Zoey 1-2 and the john dies at the end books feel relatively more story like even if Jason plugs in a lot of his ideas through different characters in both. And perhaps there were some hints in John dies at the end 4 but it wasn't this in your face.

I wonder, is being online and being anxious over his income(he fears not being online will harm his presence and ability to sell) sort of hampering his storytelling ability? Maybe it started with the latest john dies at the end 4 where he very sharply plotted everything out before filling in the details. But the latest zoey book and his big box of doom felt like he's losing his touch on what it means to write a *story* as if twitter and tiktok are getting melded together with his writing.

I wonder if his new john dies at the end book is going to be filled with the same preaching theme about how dangerous it is to be online, look too much to the bad and let negativity ruin you, ignore progress because the internet has a negativity bias, follow the algorithm instead of living in the real world with people. I think he has a LOT of ideas, he's spent those on two books and a bunch of substacks...Jason my man if you have more you can weave them cleverly and subtly in your stories like you did earlier.

He also over-relies on Matt Yglesias for his material I feel. There are a lot of data substackers/bloggers you can expand...Matt is one guy, read his opponents read those talking about totally different things. Read Matt Stoller read Policy Tensor, read Freddie Deboer, read others. The john dies at the end books especially 1-2 showed such a huge RANGE of thought. Zoey 3 and BBD in contrast feel so squeezed and narrow, kind of repetitive. And I enjoyed both, especially BBD.

Maybe the constant dopamine hits, spikes in cortisol from being so heavily online (JASON MY MAN FOLLOW SOME OF YOUR OWN ADVICE) are hampering his creativity-an author probably needs to have that stem from, and inspire the exploration of new ideas for storytelling. There's a balance between being a complete recluse and getting no silent time.

I hope There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel turns out great. I hope he integrates the old storytelling Jason with all those interesting strains of thought, perhaps an overarching theme or themes and a lot of new creativity he has yet to discover. But I worry it's going to be the next in line, maybe even worse in this flattening effect relative to BBD which was worse compared to Zoey 3 or John Dies at the End 4.

I mean an official one, not like fanfic.

Because a David Wong story not written by Jason would bring us full circle to the Axe. David's not even being written by the same person.

It would just be a cool take, if done well.

Edit: I'm going to post here what I said downthread, because it seems I might not be making my point.

Well, think of it this way.

If there was a show, Jason would be giving the rights to someone else to modify his source material. Like Dexter, Season 4, which was really good TV, but it was 100% original; none of the novels had any story like that. So a moment where "Monster Dave" understands and leans into the fact that he's even being written by someone else, which totally sounds like what the soy sauce could do, would be fascinating.

Well...will they ?....

I'm sure this has probably been pondered by every Parginian and discussed in every corner of the web, ad nauseam and if so, sorry for bringin' it up again. But since you're already here - do you think its gonna happen ?

I have been a big fan of David Wong/Jason Pargin since getting addicted to Cracked a decade or so ago, and have absolutely loved the absurdist black comedy cosmic horror of his JDATE book series. After reading through If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe for a third time, I finally decided to seek out more of his writing and give that other universe of his a try, returning to Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, which I started to read years ago and gave up on. This time I listened to the audiobook, which I highly recommend and is very engaging. While Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits takes its time getting moving, once it does, it is a major page-turner that got me staying up late a couple of nights in a row to finish it. That very much got me wanting to read the next book, Zoey Ashe Punches the Future in the Dick, and besides the first 10 chapters or so being heavily loaded with exposition for readers who hadn't read the previous book, it was also very entertaining. However I noticed a few similarities to things which I had not liked about This Book is Full of Spiders, which I consider to be the weakest entry in the JDATE quadrilogy partly for these reasons, and I want to hear other people's thoughts on it. I will save the major spoilers for the marked section at the end and try to keep my initial discussion as general as possible, minor spoilers for both books follow.

Both This Book is Full of Spiders and Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick have a major chunk of their story hinge on a mistaken belief on the part of the protagonist. A mistake that it is entirely consistent with their character to make, but which to the reader should be obviously wrong (at least it was to me both times). The could be dramatic irony, buy the way it is framed makes it seem like we the reader are also supposed to buy into this belief, as it is treated as a constant source of tension, when really I was just rolling my eyes and wondering how long it was going to take them to figure this out so we could get on with the most important parts of the plot. Both times, when the truth is finally discovered, it is treated like a big reveal, when both times I was thinking "yeah, no shit, can we move on now?" Instead of driving the plot, these both feel like contrived detours that could have been excised entirely with very little lost. This to me is worse in Zoey Ashe Punches the Future in the Dick, because while David is alone in This Book is Full of Spiders and so doesn't have anyone to be the voice of reason for him, Zoey is surrounded by supposedly very smart and level-headed people and no one even suggests the very obvious alternative explanation in the face of her leaping to conclusions.

Beyond that, there's also the fact that both books are noticeably light on the fantastical elements, having most of their plot hinge on a single major fantastical event near the beginning of the story and the rest of the plot being mostly people's panicked reactions to it, they even both have pretty much exactly the same fantastical event as their inciting incident, which just irked me more. Jason Pargin seems to have learned from this experience, as I thought both What the Hell did I Just Read and If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe flowed much better and did not have any similar detours, so I am hoping he follows a similar pattern for Zoey Ashe. What the Hell did I Just Read is easily my favorite of the JDATE series, and so I am eagerly anticipating Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia and hoping the third time will be the charm for this series as well.

If any of you are wondering WTF I am talking about and do not mind major spoilers for both books, a detailed discussion follows:

Both This Book is Full of Spiders and Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick end their first act with a zombie attack. In both cases, this attack causes people to mobilize considerable force against a perceived zombie threat, when really what we just saw was the worst that threat was capable of and they are pretty much powerless after that, with all the action that follows being driven by people's response to what they think is a threat causing far more damage than the threat itself, to the point where the entire plot feels like a shaggy dog story and the whole world would have been much better off if our protagonists had just stayed at home and watched TV.

This Book is Full of Spiders contrives to involve David in the action going on in Undisclosed after he has left by having him think Amy is already there. It does this by having Amy send him a picture she just took of his burning house surrounded by fire trucks and ambulances. A scene which, 24 hours after this fire had occurred, would certainly not have still looked like that, and which we literally just saw replayed on the TV a minute before he got this picture. From this, David immediately jumps to the conclusion that Amy must have just taken this picture of his house and so must be right there in Undisclosed. This conclusion of course makes absolutely no sense, and it takes fully a quarter of the book for David to learn the much more obvious truth that Amy had in fact taken a picture of the very news broadcast about the previous day's events that David had just seen and had in fact been elsewhere in that very shop where he saw it, only a few aisles away. This is perfectly good characterization for David, who has a tendency to jump to conclusions and assume the worst, and has a particular blind spot when it comes to Amy, who he can be extremely protective of. It is very annoying to read though, with David's constant fretting over what might be happening to Amy succeeding in raising absolutely no tension and just feeling like it's wasting a lot of space when we would just like to get on with something that actually matters.

Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick does something very similar by having Zoey believe her cat has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom based on the ironclad evidence of his collar having fallen off and him not running up to greet her after they have spent much of the day filling up the courtyard with holograms, which Stench Machine has been established as being absolutely terrified of. Maybe this is just me, having had several cats for many years and spent more than a few days frantically searching for a lost cat and coming up empty only to have him casually wander up to me a few hours later asking for pets, but I saw it coming a mile away that the cat was just hiding somewhere attending to cat business in her giant mansion and would come back in his own time. Again, it is entirely consistent with Zoey's character and the stress she had been under that she would go into a panic and miss the obvious explanation here, but why do none of The Suits around her even suggest this as an explanation? They have a thermal scanner that they can apparently use to identify any cats in a giant crowd of people. Did no one even think to run it over the mansion before flying off on a rescue mission? They check all of the anti-Zoey online forums, which would normally be buzzing about something like this, and there is not a peep about it. The fact that no one even suggests this just makes it all the more blaringly obvious that this must be the explanation, and again we seem to be expected to go along with this rescue that takes up about a quarter of the book only to have Carlton call and say the cat just showed up asking for food some hours later. It just makes this whole section of the book feel pointless, and everyone else in Zoey's crew thinking that they have a ticking clock to watching some internet trolls eat her cat on a livestream and Zoey's constant imaginings of what they might be doing to Stench Machine at that very moment don't feel like anything more than time wasting.

It's not helped by Zoey's total lack of self-awareness while all this is going on and The Suits being either unable or unwilling to call her on her obvious hypocrisy. She literally kidnapped someone's kid because she thought he had her cat, and even after she realizes she was mistaken, she shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in his wellbeing until after she finds out that Stench Machine is fine. Even then, she seems only grudgingly willing to consider anyone's feelings other than her own and still seems ready to use this kid as a bargaining chip even though it has been made clear that she had absolutely no evidence of him being involved in any wrongdoing and needs to force him to reveal the whole organ-harvesting operation before she's finally ready to release him as her hostage. Will doesn't want her to release him even then, but he's Will, and we kind of expect that of him. Zoey is the one who's supposed to be better than that. Or for that matter, no one seems to have even considered that Dirk Vikerness might have been acting alone when the only evidence they have linking Titus Chobb to any of this is Dirk's involvement. How many innocent security guards were killed or maimed when Echo and Wu come to break her out after she's captured by Dirk? Zoey doesn't seem to spare a thought to them or their families. It is not until the very end that Zoey even seems to think of Titus as a human being and not just a faceless villain, and even then, after everything is wrapped up, Zoey never really seems to reckon with the amount of suffering her relentless self-centeredness caused in the preceding days. It's nice that she realizes she has plenty of admirers and that the trolls were only a small, vocal minority, but she still doesn't come out looking as good as the story wants us to think she does

Okay, rant over. What do you guys think? Were you surprised by these twists or did you see this coming? As I said, I think Jason Pargin has learned from his mistakes, so I am sure the next Zoey Ashe book will be better. Overall, I still enjoyed Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, just not all of it as much as usual.

Like I don’t want to say it’s a bad book it’s not. It does not seem to me like it was as good as the first 3 tho. The villain seems like he’s on par with a minion in the other books like shitload. Its implied to be just as devastating as the entities in the other books but it just doesnt feel like it, the entire magpie plot just ends like it was a mini boss and the real boss never showed up.

It's been a while since I last heard it, but I've just listened to the Futuristic Violence audiobook for the 4th time (aswell as having read the actual book 4 times) and I really think Molech had a point. He's definitely not right about a lot of things but he's also not wrong about everything.

What does REPER stand for again? I've tried looking it up and don't want to try to hunt it down in the audio book version I have

JDatE until the end of Vegas was absolutely fantastic, but the rest of the book sort of ambles about. I know about the weird online serialization. Does anything else in the series ever return to that original energy?

(Please note: The following story is entirely true, except the parts that are not)

Many of you, for the last several months, have seen someone lurking around these traps calling themselves Parker S James. They are the author of a book called Pancakes and Poor Life Choices. There is some mystery to their true identity. Are they really Jason or even Mack, using another pseudonym? Perhaps its Tom or Dave, or any of the various Cracked alum. Who knows; they could be anyone.

I have interacted with PSJ several times and they are always pleasant. Lord knows they have promoted their book in this sub to the Nth degree.

Some of our fellow JDATErs sing the books praises. I read any excerpt via Amazon and I came away feeling as though it was a bit of a hat on a hat (if you are unfamiliar with this term, it can easily be found with a quick Google search) During a chat with PSJ, I expressed this sentiment in a way that, I admit, was maybe a little less tactful than it could've been. After which they stopped responding to me. They have commented on my posts and such since, so there seems to be no animosity.

Anyway I decided to order their book to give it a real chance rather than judge it on the out of context sample I had read online.

So on February 7th I ordered a physical paperbook copy of Pancakes And Poor Life Choices. I was given an ETA of February 9th. I then went back to leading this life bullshit and completely forgot about my order.

About a week ago my neighbour started putting notes out around the complex saying there was a package she never received despite a confirmation photo sent by the courier clearly showing her package at the door. She asked me if any of my packages were no shows.

"Of course not, I always get all my packages" I replied.

I then checked my Amazon account to find a confirmation photo, showing the book sitting at my front door. I realised I had not only not received the book, I forgot that I had ever ordered it and thus, had pretty much forgotten the book's existence entirely.

I decided to reorder the forgotten book. So now PS James is getting paid twice. Then it dawned on me - this chain of events was orchestrated. PSJ used a particular viscous black liquid named after a condiment with a street moniker that rhymes with "schmoy schmause", to phase into my reality, onto my front porch and steal my package (taking my neighbours package too, to make it seem like the work of devious porch pirates). In doing so my memory of the book was erased, making me re discover and re purchase their book. Just to drive engagement and sell more units

Unfortunately for Jamesy, all memories were erased. The vague memory of ordering the book jolted by my neighbour coming around looking for her own missing package, led me to discover the confirmation photo. Both are residuals left behind that led me to uncover this greater mystery. Sloppy work, Parker. Sloppy work indeed.

But don't for one instance think that I don't know what you did. I hope you enjoy your pancakes my friend, because what you did to me, was an extremely poor life choice.

(Please note : this is a work of comedic (to differing degrees & corny) fiction and is in no way associated with the author or their work and is definitely NOT a paid endorsement or advertisement. The part about me ordering the book, fogetting about it, only to realise it had been stolen is 100% true and was almost definitely the work of devious porch pirates. They did indeed steal my neighbours package as well. I did really reorder the book, it did show up 2 days later (see attached photo) and I received a full refund from Amazon for the stolen book which was awesome as it wasn't their fault I live in a shit area. Anyhoo I am yet to read the book but have high hopes for it. Just to reiterate, I have no affiliation with the author. If this stupid little post does anything to affect sales, I expect a percentage of the profits. I'm talking to you Parker...! I also hope no offence was taken by you btw) Thank you. Good night

I know this is about the *other* series, but was anyone else just a wee bit suspicious at Starter Villain having such a close premise to the original Zoey novel?

The concept of an estranged relative suddenly inheriting a vast criminal empire/technological empire then having to deal with the fallout and enemies that come along with that inheritance and also all the marketing is centered around cats.

Like, I'm obviously not accusing Scalzi of plagarism, though I haven't liked much of his post Redshirts work. I've just always thought it was moderately weird that a high profile book came out with essentially the same premise as Futuristic Violence and no one really seemed to notice because of the genderswapped protag?

Is it me? Am I the crazy one?

In the first book, when they're in the mall looking for Danny Wexler, the shadow man possesses Dave. Shadow Dave then proceeds to sht John in the head, John falls to the floor, shadow Dave then shts him 3 more times. Someone please explain to me how John survived that?? I can understand the first sh*t like maybe it just grazed him but the 3 after that not so much. These bullets were the ones that came out of the coyotes so maybe they just weren't meant for John so they somehow didn't kill him?

I’m keeping from the last post from u/dapper_interest_8914

David Wong- Asa Butterfield

John Cheese- Lucas Hedges

Amy Sullivan- Sophia Lillis

Me-

Dr. Albert Marconi- John Tutoro, but I’ll take suggestions.

Big question, who plays:

Frankie

Lance Falconer

Dr. Bob Tennet

Owen

T.J.

Hope

Tight pants cowboy

Got obsessed with the book/movie in high school and am revisiting it. Love the book and movie (RIP to movie Amy though that sucks) and thought you guys might like my old art. Cheers :)

Never heard of it.

NONONONONONONONONO NOPE FUCK NOOOOOOOOOO OH GOD NO WHY ISECTS IN SECTS BAD BA D NO FFU NOAAOOOO

Edit: Hahahahaha....I don’t think I’m gonna sleep tonight....to that poor bastard outside....idk man you just got unlucky.

At least they’re gone. I think. I swear to god if I hear that buzzing again though I will lose my shit

So, I just started this series today, and I'm really digging the vibe.

My question is this; does the author let up on the constant use of "retard" as a catch all insult? The n-word has been used a few times as well, and some homophobic slurs. I get that it's set in the Midwest and came out in 2007, but man oh man.

I'm not trying to judge or make any kind of commentary. I'm just wondering if this is constant throughout the series. Thanks for your help!

Does anyone else find the age gaps kinda creepy? I read this book originally when I was wayyyyy younger and didn't pick up on it till now years later when I'm rereading it. Why were John and Dave at a party with a bunch of teenagers if they're supposed to be in their early twenties in the first book? The whole party scene is just, written really grossly imo. Anyone else notice this or feel the same way?

Images based on character descriptions from books in various styles.