If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe

If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe is a fantasy (?) horror (?) comedy novel by Jason Pargin, who also wrote John Dies at the End.

Like John Dies at the End -- as well as Pargin's other self-descriptive novels titled This Book is Full of Spiders, and What the Hell Did I Just Read -- this novel's title completely gives away the tone and contents of the book, while still preserving enough wacky mystery that the book can surprise. In this case, I vaguely remembered that John Dies at the End was sort of gonzo-humor and so my surprise came mostly from the graphic horror elements of If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. I wasn't expecting those, didn't want them, and don't usually seek out that particular genre for my pleasure reading.

The comedy was suitably wacky, the mystery of the book was indeed clued variously throughout the book but readers would not ever have guessed the actual way it would resolve, and as the title declares, the book does attempt to describe its own provenance and the issues that it causes.

Overall this was a fine book --- a quick read at 432 pages, although I had to stop reading it before bed because the graphic horror scenes were not good pre-sleep brain fodder for dreams. The cover is an electric green-yellow and the cover art is great; the color, art, and title probably mostly explain why I picked this up and read it. It also was a good brain puzzle.

Recommended if you like horror or ghastly comedy. Pretty gorey and dark, plus I'm pretty sure almost every character is described in the depths of depression and various other mental illnesses, as well as everyone suffering under wretched capitalism and societal decline.

This post's theme word is penultimatum (n), "the demand made before an ultimatum." Climactic scenes should feature an explicitly-identified penultimatum, so that all readers can appropriately ratchet their anticipation.