Chevy Rendell asked David Wong:

Your blog posts often caution against essentialism (for example, the idea that all of the people who voted for Trump are hate-mongers). In John Dies at the End (a deliciously ambiguous title) the reader's assumptions are untethered (how reliable, for instance, is the narrator?); resolution is subsumed by acceptance that things (people/events) defy essential categories. To what extent, if any, was this deliberate?

David Wong Well horror and comedy both work from a number of different angles, sometime its holding up a thing or person who is a little outside the norm and making them out to be either ridiculous or terrifying, sometimes it's doing the same with those in power (either mocking them or revealing them to be monsters, depending on the genre). With my writing the idea is that it's kind of from a different level where it's playing with what the reader has come to expect from comedy and horror both. So the thing you expect them to be afraid of isn't a threat, the thing you don't expect to be a threat turns out to be terrifying, and the moments you'd never expect to be funny are hilarious. That's the idea, anyway.

In both genres you're always playing with people's expectations, but in my case the idea is that you have certain expectations even if you're coming in expecting horror and comedy, and we're going to try to subvert those, too, so then that (in theory) will make it both scarier and funnier. Even if you're expecting the unexpected, it's going to go to a place you wouldn't have anticipated and aren't completely comfortable with.

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