Clearing up confusion about my old pseudonym

"Wait, YOU'RE David Wong?"

About once a month, I get a fan message expressing amazement and/or confusion around the fact that the geriatric TikTok star Jason Pargin is the “David Wong” they knew from the glory days of Cracked and John Dies at the End. It comes up in every single Reddit AMA I do and in some press interviews.

Yes, I wrote under the pseudonym David Wong for more than 20 years, using the name of the fictional protagonist in my first novel who was always described as an angry, drunken white guy living under an alias to avoid unspecified enemies. “Wait,” you ask, “so you wrote as a fictional character?” Yes, and I realize it requires some explaining, so...

For the curious, here is a complete timeline and explanation of how we got here:

* 1975: The year I was born. I started hating myself soon after. None of my decisions were good.

* 1994: Just after high school but before the internet existed, I wrote a short story with my best friend, a Pulp Fiction-style action comedy featuring a character named David Wong. He was portrayed as a dirtbag who uses that name as an alias to stay off the grid, as he believed it would make him difficult to find in public records since more than 100 million people on earth share that surname. The problem was that he was a white guy living in the Midwest, so the running joke was that literally every person he runs into immediately asks him how he wound up with the name, utterly defeating the purpose of an alias. 

We would write several versions of that story and later adapt it into a screenplay, none of which was ever published. The working title was 265 Color Photographs of Balls and if you want to read these drafts, they can currently be found in a series of notebooks buried several hundred layers deep in some Illinois landfill. 

* Around 1997: I got my first home internet connection and joined several chat rooms and message boards, mostly discussing Chicago-area sports. Back then, the internet was 90% weird computer nerds and most of us used single-word hacker usernames. I often went by “dwong187”, a reference to a fictional character that, at the time, literally only two people in the entire world were familiar with. I was a deeply depressed and angry young man and spent those years writing grossly inappropriate jokes and screaming slurs at fans of rival sports teams.

* 1998-99: I started a blog where I posted whatever popped into my head that week, called Pointless Waste of Time (PWoT to the fans). Back then, bloggers not only posted under pseudonyms, but often wrote in the voice of a fictional character. Writers with names like “Lowtax” posted cultural criticism in wildly over-the-top terms and, when depicting their personal lives, would portray themselves as “loser” caricatures. You can still see this trend in long-running YouTube channels, the hosts filming pop culture commentary in the voice of a fictional, over-the-top “Angry Guy” or “Nerdy Basement-Dweller” or some other low-status archetype.

I thus wrote my essays as the character David Wong—the profane, cynical weirdo from those old short stories. I initially was writing for about a dozen acquaintances I’d met on message boards and chat rooms and, at that point in my life, did not think it would grow beyond that. I’d dreamed of being a famous writer back in high school, but my experiences in college and the years after had convinced me that I was an unremarkable talent when it came to writing or anything else. I had lasted less than two years in the career I’d racked up catastrophic student debt to pursue and was paying the bills with minimum wage office jobs assigned by a temp agency.

* 2000: On Halloween, I posted to my blog the first chapters of what was to be an ongoing piece of horror fiction, as always written in first-person as “David Wong.” It borrowed elements from that now long-lost short story and was read by a few hundred people.

* 2001-2006: My blog (and the serial horror story I’d started calling John Dies at the End) inexplicably became extremely popular, though not to the point that I was making any significant income off it. Readership to a new column would often exceed six figures in the first week, but I was still working at an insurance company doing data entry on Medicare claims for $11 an hour (I am not complaining, it was a pretty sweet job—it’s just that it didn’t leave much time for anything else). This ballooning of my audience made me extremely grateful that I had kept my identity hidden.

I had told my real name to a few fans and a circle of internet friends, but did not want notoriety or any kind of fame for my real-life self. If I had my choice (both at the time and today) I’d forever let the writing be credited to someone else. I wanted the work to get famous, not me. I never, ever wanted to, for example, have people recognize me at the mall. Anyone who knows me can confirm this.

* 2007: Within the span of a few weeks, I sold the film rights to John Dies at the End and was hired as an editor at Cracked.com. Both would represent the first time I had made substantial money from writing, at age 32. This was soon followed by a book deal with St. Martin’s Press to publish John Dies at the End in hardcover, thanks to the buzz created by the movie deal. My essays at Cracked would be posted under the pseudonym with my real name in my user profile (and, eventually, the real name would be in a footnote at the end of each column). Similarly, on my social media accounts my username was always some version of “David Wong” but with my real name in my bio.

* 2009: The JDatE hardcover would be published under the David Wong pseudonym but with my real name in the About the Author section on the dust jacket. Early in the story itself, the narrator, David, explains to the reader that he is an unremarkable white dirtbag who uses the alias for dubious reasons. 

* 2012: The second novel in the JDatE series, This Book is Full of Spiders, would make the New York Times bestseller list.

* 2015: After deciding that my third novel would be an all-new tale with new characters in a different genre, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits was published. In retrospect, here would have been a good time to switch to using my real name, since this did not have any attachment to the meta-narrative of JDatE (in which “David” is the narrator and also the “author,” as in the Lemony Snicket novels).

To be frank, switching to my real name never occurred to me at the time and (again, in retrospect) I see that this only served to confuse fans. If that novel was a reader’s introduction to my work, it would not be at all clear why it was published under that pseudonym since, even among existing fans, there was no meta narrative where FVaFS was written by the fictional character David from the other series.

* 2020: Finally, we made the decision to switch to my real name and all previous books were reprinted and published under Jason Pargin (soft G, like the alcohol). Other than having all my books be moved to a different shelf at the bookstore, the change turned out to be no big deal and it was clear that I should have done it a long time ago. Generally, I can be counted on to make the sensible decision around 10-12 years after a normal person would have done it.

* 2024: I wrote this Substack post.

* Today: You read it.

So now you’re all caught up, if someone asks, just give them this URL.

The new standalone thriller I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom comes out on September 24, you can order it at this link or wherever you get books.

But IF YOU WANT A SIGNED HARDCOVER, YOU CAN ONLY GET IT AT THIS LINK HERE AND THESE ARE ONLY AVAILABLE VIA PREORDER! If you’re seeing this after the cutoff of September 17, 2024, you missed it! Those are sold through an indie bookstore in Nashville, TN and I sign all of them with these very hands. It takes hours!