Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story

I loved this book...right up until the tepid, downbeat ending. Christopher Moore engages my imagination fully. His characters and dialogue are rippingly odd and funny, yet they still ring true. His observations of place and situation are so fresh they'll zing even the most jaded reader's palate. He sucks you into his own weird little universe until you forget where you live and that you have to get up early to go to your nice, normal little job in the morning."Bloodsucking Fiends" is a terrific, if skewed, romantic comedy. I loved it...right down to the electroplated snapping turtles. I ripped through the entire book in a state of giggly delight. Then, after a masterful build-up, the climax of the book blended soggily into a denouement instead. Other Christopher Moore books I've read have had the same problem. Instead of leaving the book feeling satisfied, I feel a bit disappointed. Kind of like having a 5-star meal, and then, instead of a stunning dessert and flavorful cappucino to cap it off, you get day-old cake doughnuts and instant Sanka.

I confess I had never thought to wonder about the difficulties that might ensue were I to wake up of an...evening and find that I had been turned into a vampire. But the logistical problems alone are considerable. You can't keep your day job. And you'll need a minion to take care of certain errands for you, like going to the bank or hunting for a new apartment with a windowless bedroom. Meanwhile, your inhumanly acute senses are picking up the sound of gnats whirring around down the block, and you don't even know *how* to be undead. Can Anne Rice's word on matters vampirish be taken as gospel?Twenty-six-year-old, red-headed Jody, the protagonist of Christopher Moore's romantic comedy Bloodsucking Fiends, finds herself in this predicament after being attacked one night on her way home from work. She wakes up under a dumpster with her left hand burnt to a crisp and perhaps a hundred thousand dollars tucked inside her blouse. ("A man attacked me, choked me, bit my neck, burned my hand, then stuffed my shirt full of money and put a dumpster on me and now I can see heat and hear fog. I've won Satan's lottery.") But unlike most fledgling vampires, Jody adapts well to her new situation. She finds a minion right off the bat, a nineteen-year-old would-be writer who's just moved to San Francisco from Indiana. Tommy will do just about anything for Jody, short of eating bugs, and that includes tolerating--indeed bonding with--a dead guy in their freezer. Soon Jody's hanging from the ceiling of their shared bedroom, reading Kerouac aloud in a post-coital, vampiric display. She and Tommy have lucked into an improbable love connection, but their relationship is not without its problems: Jody's mother doesn't approve of Tommy, for one thing, and blood-drained corpses keep turning up in the neighborhood....Bloodsucking Fiends abounds in clever dialogue and dark humor. Fans of Douglas Adams or Tom Robbins, and indeed of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at its campiest, will enjoy this fast-paced, fun read.Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I've greatly enjoyed getting to know Christopher Moore. Someone, he alluded me until around the summer of 2004, so I'm madly working on catching up. What I've enjoyed about all his books is not only the totally insane, off-kilter hilarity of his outrageously conceived plots, but the rich characters. So often "humor" novels spend more time with strange plot machinations and forget to develop rounded characters one cares about. Christopher Moore "gets" that problem and he works hard to make his characters memorable and even "believable" within their alternate worlds. Some of his books are funnier than others (LUST LIZARD OF MELANCHOLY COVE made me laugh out loud more than others), but they all have a core of humanity that is recognizable to those of us who don't live in supernatural worlds.I've also appreciated that Moore doesn't have an obvious axe to grind. Again, in many humorous stories, the author is often satirizing something for a political or social purpose. This is okay, but it often saps the humor from the story. Sometimes it's great just to kick back and laugh for no good reason. Christopher Moore delivers that.BLOODSUCKING FIENDS has great characters and a delightfully silly plot, involving modern day vampires and the men who love them. For me personally, it wasn't quite as laugh-out-loud funny as the others I've read, but don't let this dissuade you. It is a book to make you smile and feel good. Moore has a deep-down faith in humanity that shines through even his most hapless characters. People get themselves into pickles by following their basest urges...they get themselves out of them by acting ethically or even bravely.You don't need to be a vampire or horror-genre fan to enjoy the book. It isn't written to scare you or even make you break a sweat. It's not gory. It's just fun. Pure fun. And the characters are rich enough to make you care a bit.Moore will never win a Nobel prize, but there's also no one out there quite like him. I recommend all his books to adult readers.

Having read this book, I'm planning to read more of Moore's work, but I do so with a question about whether the flaws of this particular novel are specific to this one book or typical of Moore overall. Bloodsucking Fiends is often wonderfully funny, and Moore does a good job with his supernatural world meets mundane life issues, but the ending seems rushed and forced, and overall I found myself not really caring about Moore's characters. I didn't mind if they lived or died, and my lack of concern for them decreased my engagement with the story. I think that this distance between characters and reader might be intentional, because then Moore can do ludicrously awful things and we won't mind, but it's a tactic that leaves this particular reader somewhat dissatisfied. It reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One in that respect; I think that people who appreciate Moore's tone with his characters will probably find Waugh's satires hilarious.This is an entertaining book, and I'll be reading some of Moore's other novels as a result of this introduction, but I hope that his other novels are better than this one and not the same.

Great read once again.!Moore delivers more every time.Looking forward to his next book!Have a great read you won’t regret it.