A few years back David Wong, EiC over at Cracked, wrote a hilarious, terrifying story called John Dies at the End and sent it to his friends for Halloween. That story expanded, and expanded some more, and eventually became a hundred-thousand-plus word mammoth of internet white text on black background, with occasional animated spider pictures thrown in for added terror. The book generated a lot of buzz among folks like me, who get their kicks off of hilarious, terrifying fiction and experience a tingle whenever this random thing someone’s sent you on a web site turns out to actually be good, three-in-the-morning-and-work’s-tomorrow-and-still-reading good.
Unfortunately you can’t read it online any more – though you can pay David and St. Martin’s Press for the privilege by buying John Dies at the End in print or e-book form. Anyway, back when I first read JDatE during a sleep-deprived marathon in China, there were rumors of a movie being made by the same guy who made Bubba-Ho-Tep. Now, ‘rumors of a movie’ falls in the same category as the couchside “someday I’m gonna hike the entire Appalachian trail” from a guy who’s never packed fifty pounds or camped more than a night in his life. But it looks like I was wrong to discount this rumor: there’s a JDatE movie on the way. And it looks awesome: