This Thread is Full of Spiders –for all your Jason Pargin content needs

[Safe-Keeper]

Couple observations (yes, we're going full book club mode here):

The protagonist sits on the floor, munching day-old pizza, and tries to muster up the courage to start their day:

I was miserable where I was, and I would fight anyone who tried to make me leave.

This repeats a theme from I'm Starting to Worry... where a character is advised to become more 'fun' and outgoing in order to get a stable relationship. He grumpily replies that (paraphrased from memory)

it sounds like you're asking me to become a totally different person. Someone extroverted and outgoing, someone who likes to go out and do things.

To which another character replies,

Why not? You're miserable the way you are. I swear, if algorithm-driven social media had a slogan it'd be "we hate ourselves and we'll be furious with anyone who asks us to change!"

Pargin has discussed something similar in TikTok videos --this whole 'if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best' attitude, which at worst is just a way to avoid taking responsiblity for your actions and become a better person. This whole idea of personal betterment and taking responsibility for your life and actions seems to come up a lot in his works.

Another quote, from a discussion of all the myths, narratives, and conspiracy theories about the mysteries town the protagonists live in:

Humans will twist themselves into knots rather than admitting the unknowable might be unknowable.

Which again resembles a thought from I'm Starting to Worry... about how we humans have an innate drive to answer questions we have no answer to even when it means making absurd leaps of logic and even making stuff up. Read by the author:

In other news, the book is still a lovely mix of horror/mystery and hilarious deadpan comedy. The two characters are a kind of... Mystery solvers, or supernatural fixers? Like a mix of the Scooby Doo gang, the Ghostbusters, and Mulder and Scully from the X-Files, who people come to when they need help with monsters or supernatural phenomena? To illustrate, the narrator lists three cases they recently had to attend to:

1. Someone complained their dead son had started sending photos from torture chambers in Hell (they resolved this by blocking his number on her phone)
2. Someone's dog had been replaced by an identical dog that would not bark but instead melodically sing "kiss my ◊◊◊◊!" (they arrived, found the dog hilarious, and kept laughing until asked to leave (by the owner, not the dog))
3. Someone complained they had discovered a hole in their bedroom in which a "twitching, lecherous eye" would sometimes appear (they "sloppily spackled the hole" and took no further action)

Surprisingly, they note, only one of the customers paid them. Apparently being supernatural fixers is a thankless job.

 

[dann]

Because of this thread, I just discovered that I bought John Dies at the End in 2016, forgot all about it but still have it on my Kindle, unread, so thanks!

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Spoiler for the premise of the main plot of the book. Which isn't much of a spoiler, but I know some people prefer to know as little as possible about books before they read them.


They've arrived at their next client, a woman who bought her girl a big plastic egg that you have to 'feed' periodically to make toys 'hatch' from the egg. You communicate with the egg through a cell phone app, so I guess it's a bit like a modern tamagotchi (only of course with a monetization model where you can pay money to have things hatch faster). Only lately it seems to have been asking for her daughter's hair, nail clippings, and, most alarmingly, human teeth, which have been offered up to the egg by the daughter without her parents having a clue in the world where she got them from.

By the way, I still love the satirical humor you get from the way the protagonist looks at the world.

A huge TV over the fireplace played what looked like a horror movie about a creepy pair of identical twins who go around renovating houses.

I love how the book does a bait-and-switch when the mother says a pet mouse vanished from its cage at about the same time as the egg issues started up, and that the daughter suddenly had her confiscated phone back from the safe it was locked in to keep her from accessing the app. Just as I was thinking, okay, that's maybe a bit thin, the protagonist thinks to themselves that kids tend to quickly find ways to get into safes where dangerous and forbidden items are stored (I imagine it might actually be particularly easy now that channels like The Lockpicking Lawyer exist), and that mice have been getting out of cages since time immemorial. Love it when a horror book that's about the supernatural also takes the time to debunk woo. Reminds me of the worldbuilding in Harry Potter where it was a magical world, but you also had scams and things like fortune-telling which were... I don't know what to call it, pseudo-magic?

We also learn that the two main characters have made a YouTube channel where they show clips and images from their various jobs:

John made a show of studying the totally normal toy, even pulling out his phone and taking video as if there was an actual phenomenon to observe and not just a cheap hunk of plastic made in some foreign sweatshop. The bulk of our income these days was from charging people money to watch clips of our investigations online, and if there's one thing we learned, it's that the videos didn't actually need to show anything. If you kept the lighting and resolution poor and primed the audience with the right backstory and eerie music, they'd see what they wanted to see.

They also explain, again, that a big part of their job is to go to people who didn't appear to be experiencing anything supernatural and appearing to solve their problems, which reminds me of many psychics and whatnot in reality.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

That is all.

 

[dirtywick]

I love how the book does a bait-and-switch when the mother says a pet mouse vanished from its cage at about the same time as the egg issues started up, and that the daughter suddenly had her confiscated phone back from the safe it was locked in to keep her from accessing the app. Just as I was thinking, okay, that's maybe a bit thin, the protagonist thinks to themselves that kids tend to quickly find ways to get into safes where dangerous and forbidden items are stored (I imagine it might actually be particularly easy now that channels like The Lockpicking Lawyer exist), and that mice have been getting out of cages since time immemorial. Love it when a horror book that's about the supernatural also takes the time to debunk woo. Reminds me of the worldbuilding in Harry Potter where it was a magical world, but you also had scams and things like fortune-telling which were... I don't know what to call it, pseudo-magic?

We also learn that the two main characters have made a YouTube channel where they show clips and images from their various jobs:


They also explain, again, that a big part of their job is to go to people who didn't appear to be experiencing anything supernatural and appearing to solve their problems, which reminds me of many psychics and whatnot in reality.

it's an odd thing some media does, particularly horror where the topics are dealt with a lot, where they take like a skeptic or scientist of some kind that just don't believe the supernatural is real no matter what happens, then naturally they meet their end in some supernatural way as if that's some kind of justified death for the arrogant non-believer. there's a catharsis in the stubbornly arrogantly wrong character meeting their end by the thing that they were stubbornly and arrogantly wrong about to be sure, but you had to redefine reality to get there. and so rarely do you see this happen in reverse, which is why i think stuff like what you're describing is particularly notable.

i wonder if there's some kind of deep seeded anger or frustration in those particular author's lives where they believe this thing they know isn't true but desperately want it to be, so they insert their critics into their work to destroy them? probably sometimes, but probably there's other reasons as well. regardless, i always find that interesting.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

On a related note, I've watched the first hour of John Dies at the End and it's ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ hilarious so far. I'll be watching this again and again.
Wasn't available in my country, of course (we need new and better licensing laws for today's international Internet age, but that's a different discussion), but fortunately I found it on YouTube. Dunno if it's against the rules to link to full movies on YT, so I'll restrain myself.

Either way, if anyone wants an introduction to Pargin's style of hilarious, absurdist jokes and storytelling, that movie's probably a good gateway drug. Less dangerous than Soy Sauce, too.

Doesn't seem to have quite the wisdom and life lessons and such that's the hallmark of his books (at least so far), but I guess there's a limit to how much of that you can put in a movie.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Did you know he used to post on this forum?

lol. I looked up his user now that we have search back and this was the first result I found



eta, second result, things didn't improve


Feels kinda like reading about someone and learning that they were a bit of a wildchild in school.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

Looks like there's a niche for the loons in the skepticism and paranormal forum for logo design. You need extensive knowledge in gravitational energies on a planetary and universal scale, the angular differences between convention and the DNA of innovation, ancient design philosophy, and the perimeter oscillations of your client's legacy logos. This sounds like exactly the kind of work they do, and there could be seven-digit paychecks in it for them. nt1 could do consulting work analyzing luma curves.