Bloodsucking Fiends

The entire plot was so implausible, and I'm not talking about the vampire part (cuz hey, you never know). What I mean by implausible is a young woman asking a man she's known for a day to move in with her, ESPECIALLY when she has a huge and disturbing secret that would make her completely at his mercy for her safety. I'm talking about a group of drugged up losers being able to effectively battle an ancient evil vampire, and people moving to San Francisco because of Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers. Also, none of the characters were likable. The one saving grace of the book is that it was set in San Francisco; I'm a sucker for seeing the names of my streets, neighborhoods, and local joints in print.

“It's not like I came to the City saying, “Oh, I can't wait to find a woman whose only joy in life is sucking out my bodily fluids.' Okay, well maybe I did, but I didn't mean this.”

This is not my first experience with Christopher Moore. I loved A Dirty Job, and wrote up a review on it, but it never posted and I never rewrote it. Loved Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. I read part of Fool as part of a self-designed plan to really understand King Lear from different angles – the play, different performances, the Moore book – then I cleaned and now I can't find anything.

Anyhow...

Moore has a very definite outlook and it's pretty funny. People who read him are always talking about him as a great humor writer, but his strength is writing about how humor battles sadness, copes with tragedy, keeps people going. The moments when the books are just serious are pretty rare, but his topics even in his funniest books are deeper than they seem.

Flood in dealing with his girlfriend being a vampire reads a lot of books, most of them fiction, although he's sure that Stoker or Rice must have known a real vampire or two. The Vampire Lestat is mentioned often and that book and this one don't seem all that similar. However, TVL was largely about loneliness, of losing loved ones and everything falling to ruin around you – at least that's what I got from it when I was sixteen ::grin:: – and this becomes one of Jodie's sources of angst too. She loves Tommy (Flood), but she can't share with him the way the world is for her now, because there are no words for it. Tommy wants to share his world with her too, but there never seems to be time, and there are so many barriers. Only Moore makes you laugh when he's sharing this in a way that Rice never does, at least not intentionally. :)

I read Moore and am torn between laughter and queasiness, because some pretty grim events happen but the quips don't stop. I guess I'd like to see what he'd be like with 30% of the humor dialed back, just out of curiosity, but I think that says something about the way I handle the things Moore tackles with humor. A book as a Rorschach.

Moore's best characters are lovable, er, rear holes. Good people saying weirdly inappropriate things and occasionally being pretty dumb in strangely realistic ways. See Flood's plan to stick Jodie in a freezer and how that all worked out – but it makes a strange bit of dumb sense and anyone spending time around other people or even with an understanding of self can see how most of the crazy choices happen. I think that's one of the author's strengths – the acknowledgment that fairly smart people do crazy things as opposed to intelligent people in books usually benefiting from the calm mind of the author as God. No, Moore's characters are just allowed to make bad decisions or not think things through. I always get the impression Moore likes people – maybe not big crowds of them, but the individual quirks.

Anyhow, all of this is a disjointed way of saying Moore is a writer that readers gush about and recommend for a reason. I've started the sequel, You Suck but one of my preorders showed up and is taking precedence. Besides, good authors are the ones you want to savor. :)

As a Christopher Moore fan, its hard for me to not be biased. I do regret only just now getting around to reading some of his earlier works. Being from the Bay Area it's nice to read a story that places its characters in places I have been and can view without having to know much detail. This story, while not super complex, was glorious in all its various parts. From the troubled Jody being turned with no answers, to the timid and newly rejuvenated Tommy moving from Midwest nowhere to hustle and bustle SF. I have to say I wish we as readers knew more about The Emperor and his place as well as wishing we could have gotten a deeper glimpse into the mind of The Vampire. However, thats why sequels are written. A fun quick read that brought laughter, grossness, and even a bit of fright.