John Dies at the End

service, enjoying cups of coffee laced with a great deal of brandy.We stood on the balcony, looking over the city through clouds of my pipe smoke.Sharon said, “Those poor people. Why did they have to die?”I snorted a laugh around my pipe. “We all have to, dear.”She didn’t smile. “You know what I mean. The way they died, sick and blind and screaming for their gods to save them, with no answer in return.”She turned her eyes to me.“The gods are cruel, aren’t they, Albie?”I drew a deep breath and replied, “Every living being has but one need: power. Power over other living things. You need it to grow, to eat, to reproduce. And cruelty is the ultimate expression of power. To impose needless, extreme suffering and humiliation on another. It is the purest demonstration of strength. Toddlers learn it in the nursery.“Therefore every organism, from the microbe up, wears its cruelty as a badge to mark its upward progress. Prey must be subdued, competition must be starved, enemies must be wiped out. One would thus assume that we find the same among the gods, only more so. That at each level of the heavens we find higher and higher levels of greed, brutality and mindless spite. How else could they have become gods?”Sharon shivered, though it was not cold on the balcony.In a barely audible voice she asked, “But is that really the way it is? The work you do—you would know better than anyone.”I set my pipe aside and turned, to let her look into my eyes. I said,

Afterword

If you want to know when the next edition in the John and Dave series will appear on bookshelves or when the film adaptation will hit theaters, go to my permanent home on the Web at JohnDiesattheEnd.com. There you can keep up with the latest news and further explore the John Dies at the End universe. You can also find me at comedy megasite Cracked.com, where I serve as the editor and, as such, have somehow gained full-time employment writing poop jokes. Yes, it is a ridiculous universe we live in.

Speaking of which, it should be pointed out that the story behind this story, the tale of how John Dies at the End wound up in print at all, should be an inspiration to anyone who works in a cubicle and/or is really easily inspired.

Back in 2001 I was living a double life. During the day I was just a guy doing data entry at a law office, for single digits an hour. But at night, I would change out of those khakis and assume another identity: Guy Doing Data Entry at an Insurance Company. Fortunately the 75 hours a week I spent filling in columns of numbers on computer screens didn’t leave much time for the crushing depression.

Around Halloween of 2001, during the few hours of personal time between cubicles, I took to the Internet and shared a tale of me and my friend and a monster made of meat. On the first day, only six people read the story. The next day, the number grew to eight. Then ten. I had clearly stumbled onto a word-of-mouth phenomenon and after one year, the story had been read by nearly seventeen people.

Riding this buzz, I sat down again and relayed more of the tale and would do the same the following year. By 2005 the chronicles of our adventures had grown to 150,000 words. E-mails poured in from readers, fans telling me they stayed up all night reading the story, then called in sick to work the next morning to finish it. People were printing the whole tale, eating up a ream of paper and three ink cartridges in the process, then binding it with rubber bands and loaning it to friends.

I believed for the first time that I had tapped into something, and that something was the fact that lots of people are crazy and/or have lots of spare time on their hands.

At this point I was contacted by independent horror publisher Permuted Press, who asked me about doing a print run of the story as a trade paperback. I told them no, that no one would ever actually pay money to read it. Then the transmission went out on my car and I decided I couldn’t turn my nose up on whatever meager amount of money would come in. The resulting book, written by a data entry clerk with no previous publishing experience and not even an English degree to boast of, sold about five thousand copies through sheer word of mouth. When the print run ended, rare copies were selling on eBay for up to $120.

Next I got an e-mail from horror writer/director/producer Don Coscarelli (who made two of my favorite horror movies of all time, Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep), which I immediately deleted, assuming it was a hoax. But he was persistent and after convincing me on the phone that it wasn’t all an elaborate prank to get me up on a stage so he could pour a bucket of pig’s blood on me, we made the deal to turn John Dies at the End into a movie. After the ink was dry, more than half a dozen other offers for film rights would come in.

At that point it was pretty clear that the entire world was just fucking with me. Keep in mind I was still working at the insurance company, still sitting in a cubicle every day, eating those awful diagonally sliced sandwiches from the vending machine, and reading memos about the dress code.

Word of mouth. That’s all it was. No one “discovered” me, I didn’t get some big break out of the blue. It was a slow advance of strangers from around the world, passing around the link and loaning out those sad homemade copies. These are the zealots who would later buy copies, loan them to friends, then buy more copies when those never came back. Hundreds of passionate strangers whom I’ve still never met—they’re responsible for the edition you hold in your hands. I wish I could thank all of them by name. So, let me do that now. (Please turn the page.)

Amy Brown

Laura Taylor

Lee Beckman

Brandon Sharp

Tim Richardson

Ross Wiseman

Michael T. Hawkins

Ville Nousiainen

Nick Mathews

Curtis Jeffs

Matt Garner

Josh Yagley

Jennifer Liang

Charles Cooper

Jim Mahar

Nate Bailey

Tarnir Hadary

Ryan King

Chuck Sebian-Lander

Lucas de Carvalho Martinez

Rianna Turner

Tomas Fitzgerald

Alex Augustine

David Scully

Stuart Layt

Tyrone Cameron

Victoria Liakhova

Ira Jacobs

Bob Clark