One of the Christmas books I received this year (from my younger son) was John Dies at the End by David Wong, an author whose blog post I recently linked to. I liked it enough to finish it, not enough to want to read the forthcoming sequel. One of the things I didn't like was the degree to which the central characters seemed to be acting irrationally, along with consuming considerable quantities of alcohol and, in one case, drugs. Another was the degree to which the whole picture did not entirely make sense and the feeling that that was not an issue the author cared much about. It occurred to me that perhaps my response was the flip side of the objection some readers make to my fiction, that everyone, and everything that happens, is too rational. Partly, I suppose, that is a disagreement about what people are like, partly about what they should be like, partly about what is interesting or entertaining about other people's behavior.