Tangentially, John Dies at the End is fucking great, easily one of my top book series. Kinda prefer the original online version of the sequel, but that's hard to find these days, and the print version is still good. The movie's pretty good, although it's a shame they cut so much. I get why, movies can only be so long, but would have been cool to see all the stories from the book get told.
Yeah, the core plot idea was pretty much the same, but the way it played out was pretty different. The whole thing stays way more low key, and I wanna say the whole jail thing never happened. It's been a long time since I read either version, so I'm fuzzy on the details, but it definitely got a significant rework for publication.
I've tried to find a copy of the original before, and I think I found a poorly cloned website with the original links a few years ago, not updated to point at the new clone so I had to tweak it every time to continue. I'd love to get it converted to an ebook so I could archive it, but I haven't tried in years now.