Bite Me by Christopher Moore
Tired of reading about sexy vampires having sword fights… or orgiastic love fests? What about tragically misunderstood yet sensitive and compassionate vampires? Much as MaryJanice Davidson is the godmother of vampire chick lit, Christopher Moore owns the market of the stoner-loser vampire. In Bite Me, the sequel to You Suck (which was in turn the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends), Moore once again puts the fun in dysfunctional and demonstrates why he is the king of crass, the executor of non sequitur… err, anyway, one of the funniest fantasy authors writing today.
It starts with the sometimes narrator. Imagine Juno’s snarky heroine, recast as a tragically gothic vampire wannabe. Now cut her verbal filter in half. Yeah. A journal entry:
The City of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge, shaved vampire cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal[note: her real name is Alison Green],emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay Area night, and my manga haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public. Which isn’t, like, as bad as it sounds, because the general public kind of sucks ass.
The story itself is a vehicle for a wide range of funny characters, situations and conversations. Witness the following exchange between Foo Dog and Allison’s gay friend, Jared, who is wearing her Skankenstein boots.
What bothered Foo was not that Jared had on girl’s boots, but that he had on the boots of a girl with distinctly small feet.
“Don’t those hurt?”
Jared tossed hair out of his eyes. “Well, it’s like Morrissey said, life is suffering.”
“I think the Buddha said that.”
“I’m pretty sure Morrissey said it first — like, back in the eighties.”
“No, it was the Buddha.”
“Have you ever seen a picture of the Buddha with shoes on?” Jared asked.
Foo couldn’t believe he was having this argument. What’s more, he couldn’t believe he was losing this argument.
What’s not to like? Well, there’s a lot of crass language in this novel so, for those who find that offensive, be warned. More to the point, everyone’s taste in humor differs, and I’m pretty sure I enjoy reading humor more than most; so take my recommendation for what it is worth. But I’m a huge Christopher Moore fan. And this is one of my favorite of his novels.
Love Story — (1995-2010) Publisher: Here’s something different: a vampire novel that’s light, funny, and not at all hackneyed. Between scenes of punks bowling frozen turkeys on the graveyard shift in a supermarket, or snapping turtles loose in a loft and gnawing on designer shoes, this novel has comic charm to spare. But it also packs an appealingly downbeat message about the consumer culture: Becoming a vampire has given the twentysomething heroine “a crampless case of rattlesnake PMS” — a grumpy mood in which she realizes that she can dress to the nines as a “Donner Party Barbie” and still end up disillusioned and unhappy, just another slacker doing her own laundry and watching sucky TV ’til the sun rises. Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under an alley Dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching neck, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realizes the decision has been made for her. Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that’s where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, Indiana, Tommy (to his friends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen-turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful undead redhead walks through the door… and proceeds to rock Tommy’s life — and afterlife — in ways he never imagined possible.
That reminds me, I have his Coyote Blue sitting around someplace. I oughta finally read it…