- Adorkable: Amy's nerdy habits and outgoing, cheerful attitude result in this.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: Is John the plucky sidekick, a complete jerk, or more of a hero than the narrator? One was provided by John's creator, portraying him as a guy from a broken home who, rather than Wangst about his past, copes with over-the-top humor.
- Complete Monster: The evil bio-computer Korrok is a sadist with the personality of a wicked teenager. Korrok runs his world as a brutal dictatorship, with people tortured endlessly for fun as Korrok routinely devours the populations of worlds and holds them in torment, having people fed to him just for the enjoyment of the sacrifice. Korrok attempts to take over other universes and exterminate or enslave the populations, utilizing parasites infecting people to painfully spread them across his target worlds.
- Crossing the Line Twice... three times... eight times... twelve to fifteen... per page...John: Remember, these are children. Aim low.
- Friendly Fandoms: With Homestuck of all things. Though not all that surprising when you consider the two actually have very similar sense of humor, and a surprising amount of Lovecraftian influence. Also, the main characters are a pair of best friends named John and Dave.
- Genius Bonus: Jennifer patches up her leg with ace bandages and a tampon. History (or medical) buffs will know that tampons were originally used in war to plug up gunshot wounds.
- Harsher in Hindsight: There's a joke about inverted Spy Speak; John says things like "Tomorrow we kill the president" as a code word for "pick me up a pack of smokes on the way home". This book came out long, long before the NSA PRISM scandal broke.
- Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
- One-Scene Wonder: Korrok only actually appears during the climax of the book, but man does he make an impression.
- Special Effect Failure: In the film, the scenes in Korrok's world and the cavern by which it's accessed are done with bluescreen work worthy of a Syfy Original Movie.
- Unintentional Period Piece: While the story itself holds up fairly well, some of the humor painfully dates it to the mid-2000s.
- The book makes liberal use of the words "retard" and "retarded," something that's fairly cringe-worthy as of the end of The New '10s, as well as less generous but still glaring use of "Fag".
- A number of the pop-culture references have not aged well, notably references to Limp Bizkit and Jennifer Lopez fall rather flat.
- John smokes a cigarette during breakfast at Denny’s, at the time the book was written (mid 2000s) smoking sections were on the decline, by the time it was published, indoor smoking at restaurants was illegal in most states.
