All My Friends Are Dead

This book, written and illustrated by Avery Monsen and Jory John (who did which? I don't care enough to reopen the book to find out), is another that I've just breezed through out of a five-minute span of unoccupied time at my friend's house. It was on the sort of under-tabletop surface-shelf thing on the coffee table, which upon reflection I feel is the perfect place for this book if one were to own it. It's not long or varied enough to be a toilet book, it's not universally-accessible or pleasant enough to be a coffee-table-top book, it's not really enough of a book that you'd intentionally Sit Down And Read to warrant a place on a shelf.

   It's basically just one joke - death. On repeat. A variety of cartoon characters (ranging from dinosaurs to clowns to cassette tapes to just plain old Old People) announce in bold friendly writing that all, most, many, or whatever, of their friends, are dead (though this varies slightly as the book goes on, venturing into several puns that, in my opinion, narrowly avoided being outright non sequiturs). It's not particularly funny and it's not even particularly bleak.* If you know someone who thinks they like dark humour but in reality is a bit of a tame lame membrane, this book would be a decent present for them. However, as much as I enjoyed the neat style of the illustrations, there is an enormous potentiality of powerful existential absurdity in the topic of death and I don't feel this book even came close to properly milking it. So, overall my response to the book would have to borrow its own blurbline - "have you ever laughed and cried at the same time?"

   Yes.

   But not reading this.

* If your interest has been partially piqued but nowhere near enough to acquire a copy of this book, then I shall recount for you the single funniest bit. It involved a tree saying, "all my friends are end tables," followed by an end table saying, "I was never friends with that guy," followed by another picture of the tree looking sad.