23rd March 2025

It’s the 90s, it’s San Francisco, and it’s a vampire. Christopher Moore puts together another bizarre collection of comedy characters to explore what happens to ordinary people’s lives when someone unexpectedly becomes a vampire.

It’s old now, and clearly it’s trying to be satire, but still feels like it’s not quite escaped yet from some of the tropes it thinks it’s trying to take the mickey out of.

While it’s the fourth of Moore’s novels that I’ve read, it’s an earlier written one, and I’m not sure he’s yet developed the style of humour that I appreciated most in Lamb. It will be interesting to see how this changes when I get to the later vampire novels and see how they align.

Overall, a middling novel. I wasn’t as engaged as I wanted to be, but equally I wasn’t disengaged.

read more

3rd August 2024

Having read two of Moore’s later works I decided to stock up on some of the earlier ones, and where better to start than the beginning.

It’s the story of a small town, and the various people who live there and how their lives interact in complicated and interesting ways. Particularly when two supernatural beings from before the dawn of time show up and interfere with them.

It’s a fun novel, but I feel like I can tell it’s an earlier work - there’s not quite the roaring finesse of the other books I’ve read. It has a repeated habit of introducing characters fairly late, and going off and telling their whole backstory at that point, which feels like a bit of an odd diversion while there’s plot going on. In some places, I started to struggle with remembering which character was which.

But overall, a happy entertaining read, and I’m looking forward to watching the style develop now as I read through more of the back catalogue.

read more

9th March 2024

My second visit to the mind of Christopher Moore was as enjoyable as the first. In this novel we meet Charlie, who through a CD-related accidental encounter, believes he has become Death.

It’s a hilarious yet also very sad novel in places, including right at the start. There are a plethora of fascinating characters, and it’s lovely to see a world populated by so many of them who are really fleshed out and leave you wanting to spend more time with them.

The plot feels a bit chaotic, and there are some parts where I’m not sure I entirely followed what was happening. Time doesn’t really pass in a linear fashion, with jumps ahead after the first act which don’t always seem to quite flow. But that doesn’t stop the fun.

I’m inspired again to find more of his books - Moore has an inspiring comic take on the world.

read more

27th November 2022

This has been on my wish list for so long that I can’t remember who recommended it or why, but I eventually picked it up in a sale, and have not been at all disappointed.

The conceit is that Christ’s pal Biff has been resurrected around the year 2000 to write a more accurate gospel, and this is the result, along with some notes about his time trapped in a hotel room with an angel during the writing process.

In some respects, the novel is respectful to Christianity - the Christ represented remains the actual son of god, many of the events from the traditional gospels do take place, and it doesn’t meddle with the theology.

In other respects it’s hilarious and there’s tons of stuff that Moore has added to make the story more believable or more fun. I particularly enjoyed Biff’s frequent inventions and discoveries.

As the author notes in the afterword, there’s potentially a niche audience - you’ve really got to have that background of knowing the traditional biblical stories to get the jokes and references, but not be the sort of person to get offended by the same. Luckily that’s me.

read more