Christopher Moore: A Brief Appreciation

When I first read Practical Demonkeeping I was a seminary drop-out with a penchant for Lovecratian beasties and dark humor. The book resonated with me, to say the least. My second reading of the book was less than a week after I had finished it the first time. The last time I read it was when I was going through my divorce. There's a marriage falling apart in the book, and honestly, I wept while reading it that time. Everything Moore has written has been fun, funny, and strangely meaningful for me (well, I can't honestly say "everything." For some inexplicable reason, I haven't read Fluke yet).

Now we are moving towards the release of Bite Me which continues the story of the vampires begun in Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck. Moore's vampire protagonists are, in every way imaginable, cooler than Lestat, except in the area of actual coolness (where, frankly, Lestat is king, except, perhaps, as portrayed by Mr. Cruise). His books are not for children, at least for values of "not for children" that include "children shouldn't be exposed to scenes of cannibalism, sex, drug use, vulgar language, and demons." Maybe adults shouldn't be, either. But the residents of Pine Cove (as well as the other denizens of Chris Moore's imagination) are a likable, maybe even lovable, group of wacky and wonderful people. I almost feel like a Pine Cove citizen myself, at least while under the spell of the reading of his books. The nearest I've ever had to such literary comraderie are the patrons of Callahan's in Spider Robinson's books (which I was always tempted to read with an Irish coffee in hand, just to add to the atmosphere).

Not all of Mr. Moore's books are set in Pine Cove. The most recent book, Fool, is a Moorean twist on the Shakespeare's King Lear story. A bit of a temporal departure from the contemporary setting of most of Moore's novels, it is, nevertheless, an endearing bit of saucy Shakespearean pastiche (and recently out in paperback for those of who only, um, thriftily read a library copy of the hardcover).

Fool is not the only one of his books set in a different time period. Lamb, of course, sits firmly at the turn of the calendar, being the tale of Christ as told by his childhood pal Biff. While potentially offensive, the book takes seriously that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God. There is no denigrating his deity nor his humanity. There are bits that are completely made up, but it's a novel, one written by an acknowledged master of humor and weirdness. If you want to be really offended, dig up a copy of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man.

So, April 1... Bite Me. Crossing fingers for fast access to the library's copy.