Bloodsucking Fiends | Christopher Moore

Bloodsucking Fiends | Christopher Moore | If Carl Hiaasen or Bill Fitzhugh wrote a vampire novel this would be it!

books:

Bloodsucking Fiends

	Bloodsucking Fiends Christopher Moore Harper Paperbacks, 2004 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 140 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Vampire book...

This was my first book of Christopher Moore's and it won't be my last! His humor is wonderful and adds more than a little flair to the book. I can't wait to read the next one!

If Carl Hiaasen or Bill Fitzhugh wrote a vampire novel this would be it!

This is another very enjoyable hilarious mild horror adventure that once finished will have you looking for everything else Christopher Moore has ever published. Bloodsucking Fiends is his third novel and easily one of his best. This book was written back in 1995 and has proved so popular he has recently written a second vampire adventure with some of these characters You Suck.

If you like the surreal eccentric character comedy novels also check out the authors Bill Fitzhugh (Pest Control's a great place to start), Carl Hiassen (Stormy Weather's as good as any other), Dave Barry (Tricky Business) and Max Barry (Syrup). If classic horror vampire tales are more your thing you can't go wrong with I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.

In Bloodsucking Fiends Jody is your average woman in her mid twenties, she lives in San Francisco, has a mother who's very disappointed in her life, a deadbeat boyfriend and a 9 to 5 job. Her life suddenly gets (or more accurately ends) a lot more exciting when she wakes up under a dumpster with a burnt hand after being attacked on the way home from work. She quickly works out she's a vampire and cannot venture outside in the day so will need a partner to get her car out of impound, find her an apartment and do a heap of other things you can't do at night. This is where yet to be successful write Tommy C Flood comes into play.

Tommy's recently moved to SF from Indiana and is having problems adjusting. He lives in a dorm room with a heap of Chinese guys named Wong. Mysteriously he keeps finding flowers on his bed which is weird considering he hasn't even encountered that many women let along interacted enough to get a secret admirer. A kind homeless man known by everyone as The Emperor tells him of a job as a night stacker manager going at the local supermarket, which turns out to be true and his. There he meets his fellow employees who are known as the animals. Along with unloading trucks they spend the nights skiing behind floor cleaners, bowling with frozen turkeys and other stuff day staff and customers don't know about. This is also where he will meet Jody who is about to make his life a lot more exciting and complicated! Fans of Moore's first novel Practical Demonkeeping will be pleased to know that homicide police officer Rivera has also moved to San Francisco and is one the case of a serial killer who is somehow draining pretty much all the blood from the bodies of the victims.

for more information click here

Humor...with Bite

If other vampire yarns are getting too melodramatic for you, or you just want to relax and read something that'll make you laugh out loud, you can't go wrong with this superlative novel about life after undeath.

Moore Strikes again

My favorite is still Lamb, but I laughed a lot with this one - out loud...

What FUN

My first Christopher Moore novel BLOODSUCKING FIENDS: A LOVE STORY delights, enthralls, and heartily amuses in tearful fits of laughter, all in the context of a vampire love story spun into a hysterical parody. BLOODSUCKING FIENDS sucks you right in, and even during the slower mid-to-late portions of the novel, I couldn't put the book down. I absolutely loved the contemporary western prose replete with references to American movies, writers and products, I was enchanted by all of the characters, I enjoyed the San Francisco backdrop, and I was charmed by the love story itself. Nothing special in the plot, Christopher Moore writes to his strengths: absolutely relentless humor and a satirical parody of sorts. This book had me laughing out loud at various places as Moore relentlessly packs every paragraph with his offbeat, quirky humor. The book contains adult language and at times some violence (thought nothing too bad).

Reading Christopher Moore was like being a kid in a candy store.

The Story.

BLOODSUCKING FIENDS features 26 year-old, "cute-but-not-beautiful," green-eyed, red-haired, Transamerica employee Jody Stroud breaking free from her shell of insecurities and fears. Jody can't seem to live without a man in her life and attracts the worst kind of handsome, hunky jerks who exploit her sweet, passive nature. She's lived with so many guys over the years, she's lost count.

As the story begins, Jody is meekly walking home to her latest, hunky jerk of a boyfriend, Kurt. After she's suddenly attacked in a dark San Francisco alley, she wakes up the night after with heightened senses, a bunch of money and a wry retaliatory disposition, the vampire predator in her finally fighting back. Jody rebels, she rebels against people walking all over her, she rebels against her jerk of a boyfriend and knocks him out to suck some blood, and her survival instincts kick in as she seeks dark shelter from sunup to sundown. We're treated to the fun superhuman intricacies that go along with learning to cope with your new Vampire-self. Jody kicks some serious butt and the book rises above the hangover a lot romance novels have over insecurities in appearance. But then again, this isn't exactly a romance novel as much as it is Christopher Moore's hilarious parody on vampire love.

"[Jody] thought, There must be a hundred thousand dollars here. 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."

Meanwhile, C. Thomas Flood's family and friends ostracized him from his home in Indiana for trying to make it as a writer and being a bit on the sensitive side. Tommy doesn't exactly fit in with stereotypical hickville consisting of bowling, beer and rampant sex. After his car burns down from the drive to San Francisco, Tommy now needs a place to stay and a job to support his potential writing career. A comical, older homeless man known as "The Emperor of San Francisco" suggests a Safeway store for Tommy's job. By the way, the Emperor and his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus that he affectionately refers to as his "troops," are in some ways the heart of the novel. The Emperor rocks!

Tommy meets Jody meet and things progress. Despite growing closer intimately, both still feel lonely since they're not like each other (one's a vampire, the other a human), and a younger Tommy constantly laments, "You're going to break my heart, aren't you." Jody answers, "Irreparably."

Jody and Tommy experiment over the fact vs. fiction of vampire culture. The exchanges are funny and I thought Moore handled the interchanges between a younger Tommy and an older Jody well. Since he's younger, Tommy does get a bit whiny at times, but he never manages to lose his sense of humor. It's a tumultuous relationship but a funny one nonetheless and Moore gets guys right: horny, sex-crazed beings of lust that can show tremendous love. Thankfully, Moore avoids the endless lovesick introspection romance novelists force upon their heroes' thoughts for their heroines and yet BLOODSUCKING FIENDS: A LOVE STORY still captures our hero Tommy's emotional affection for Jody.

Intermingled with this romance, Moore weaves the growing concern over the mysterious deaths of terminally ill people. Our homicide detectives investigating the deaths, the gay-but-rough Cavuto and the serene Cuban/Mexican/Colombian Rivera, make for an intriguing pair in their own right. The older vampire who initially turned Jody seems to be at large, and Jody and Tommy suspect the older vampire. It's funny, some of the interchanges between a feisty Jody and the laughing, older Vampire reminded me of the myriad of hero-and-heroine interactions from romance novels. The hundreds year-old vampire is darker and more mysterious than Tommy and that darker, mysterious quality fits the romance-hero mold much more so than our humble, skinny writer-boy Tommy.

In many ways, Jody and Tommy represent Moore's iconoclast figures in love stories.

Tommy interrupted, "Actually, there's only one body in the freezer. The other is my girlfriend."

"You sick [!#@]." Cavuto drew back as if to hit Tommy.

BLOODSUCKING FIENDS: A LOVE STORY had me in a constant state of laughing, chuckling, smiling and anticipating fervor. Good book, the love story itself may not work for some, but I enjoyed that aspect as well.

for more information click here