Monday “Book” Review: ‘Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon’

Book by Zack Parsons

Review by Aaron J. Waltke

Perhaps it is a sad state of affairs when I can say that I am no longer fazed by the outlandish and disturbing extremes that human beings will go to in order to distinguish themselves as depraved outcasts in a society already overpopulated by the corrupted and insane. I don’t mean to suggest with that statement that I’ve become some hardhearted war veteran, calloused to graphic images of genocide, death, inequality and evil in its purest forms. Those are all still pretty bad, even in my eyes.

I just mean I’ve been on the Internet a lot.

The profound impact of the Internet on the human psyche, specifically the combined aspects of anonymity and the open platform for expressing oneself it provides, has summoned from the cyber-depths and given a voice to some very, very strange individuals. I’ve seen whole online communities dedicated to a sexual fetish revolving around the collecting and popping of birthday balloons. I’ve seen forums where people believe they are capable of firing Dragonball Z kamehameha energy blasts from their palms if they flail their arms and yell into their webcams. I have stared deep into the eye of the digital abyss, and I pray to whichever patron saints are in charge of Google Image Searches and browser histories that those perversions of cyberspace have not stared too deeply into me.

Zack Parsons’ new humor book entitled “Your Next Door Neighbor is a Dragon” takes the grotesque fascination of Internet voyeurism one step further than I am comfortable with— that is, meeting face-to-face with the reprobates and weirdoes of the World Wide Web and documenting his encounters with them in real life (or IRL, in internet-speak).

Mr. Parsons, whose familiarity with online weirdness stems from years as a staff writer for the popular humor website SomethingAwful.com, takes an approach to exploring the bizarre substrata of Internet culture that is as dodgy and nonlinear as his subject matter.

Parsons dives in head first, taking us on a whirlwind tour of the Internet’s Most Infamous denizens. He allows us to meet firsthand the type of people who believe the sugar substitute aspartame is a poison designed to suppress our collective will to rise up against the New World Order (as implemented by the reptilian alien shadow government). This segues with startling ease into the blind “zeppelin-centric” fanaticism of the online Ron Paul movement at a launch rally (“They’ll be able to see the blimp from the overpass and think to Google Ron Paul!”). Next, we are given a chance to meet Roger, a man who believes he possesses the blood lineage of elves and all of their inherent supernatural powers after he found an Otherkin newsgroup where likeminded individuals proclaimed their own ancestry is descended from dragons, orcs, fairies, and their favorite anime characters, which in turn imbues them with special abilities beyond their frail human brethren.

It just gets weirder from there. There’s a particularly vivid scene in a chapter dedicated to vorarephelia or “vores”, those who have the fantasy of being eaten alive and share their love of this enterprise with others on the web. Imagine my surprise when the author sits down with an otherwise conservative girl in her early 20’s living with her parents on a ranch in central Texas, sipping sweet tea in her rocking chair as she sketches out images of princesses being dissolved in the stomachs of giant frogs, with similar gory scenes adorning every square inch of her otherwise girly bedroom.

These are just a few strange examples in a book comprised entirely of strange examples.

The book itself is written as a sort of gonzo travelogue, spanning styles from faux-journalistic brevity to bouts of wildly subjective fiction, drug-induced hallucinations, and appeals to Super God (it makes sense in the book). As I was following along, I did have the thought that the real world characters in this book are strange enough that there’s really no need for embellishment, even with the artistic license granted by satire. An interview with a man who claims he can sense the “dragon-ness” of a jar of mayonnaise in a Dollar General makes for a fascinating train wreck no matter how you slice it. That being said, if you accept the trope of an unreliable narrator who confronts characters with unreliable perceptions of reality, then it can still make for a very entertaining read.

What Zack Parsons is most successful with in “Your Next-Door Neighbor is A Dragon” is putting a face, if a somewhat doughy and ill-shaven one, to the odd impulse for irrationality that is buried in the icky subconscious of everyone who is given an open forum to express dumb ideas that they secretly want to believe is true—and have other lonely people who embrace their stupidity. In the end, it turns out that White Supremacists can throw a friendly barbeque and Furries (people who dress as anthropomorphic animals) are often cockteases (tailteases?). These are the ties that bind.

Thanks to Zack Parsons, we all know that now.

Zack Parsons is a writer for SomethingAwful.com and author of “My Tank Is Fight!” His second book, “Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon”, is available now at Amazon.com.

Aaron J. Waltke is a contributor to the National Lampoon. You can email him at awaltke@nationallampoon.com.