Christopher Moore
William Morrow/Harper Collins
2007

Christopher Moore’s You Suck: A Love Story is a rollicking funhouse ride with vividly rendered characters and plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. It is silly, sophomoric, and smutty, but a lot of fun to read.

The book starts with a bang as 19-year-old Tommy Flood realizes his beautiful vampire girlfriend, Jody, has just killed him and turned him into a vampire, too. After Tommy’s initial shock at the transformation, he discovers the downside to enhanced senses (“Everyone smells like whiz and feet”) and not being able to drink coffee or eat real food. But with Jody’s help, he also explores the upside to being undead (clear skin, straightened toes, recovered foreskin, and crazy monkey sex).

There are practical considerations the couple has to deal with—making arrangements to secure a new apartment and move into it is difficult when you are literally dead to the world by day—so Tommy and Jody hire a 16-year-old goth-girl named Abby Normal to be their “minion” to help them during daylight hours. Entries from Abby’s journal are peppered throughout the book and her interpretations of events provide some of the most hilarious moments of the novel.

Moore’s greatest asset as a writer is his ability to create amazingly realistic characters that jump off the page. There are lots of them, but each character is so unique it is easy to keep them straight and their vibrant personalities carry the book. Among some of the stand-out characters are William the homeless guy who owns a huge cat named Chet, Tommy’s turkey-bowling Safeway coworkers appropriately nicknamed “The Animals,” Blue the hooker who paints herself like the Blue Man Group in hopes of extending her career expiration date, and the Emperor of San Francisco (“a great boiler tank of a man, an ambling meat locomotive in a wool overcoat, his face a firebox of intensity, framed with a gray tempest of hair and beard such as are found only on gods and lunatics”).

You Suck is a sequel to Moore’s Bloodsucking Fiends (published in 1995), but Moore picks up the action exactly where the first book ended and summarizes its plot in a few quick lines, so even readers new to Moore will have no trouble enjoying the ride. For folks already part of Moore’s cult following, there’s the extra treat of surprise appearances by characters from some of his other books.

Forget about Anne Rice’s dark and brooding navel-gazing vampires, I’d much rather spend Halloween with Chris Moore’s fun and fallible children of the night.

October is John C. Leonard’s favorite month of the year, but he prefers Thanksgiving over Halloween.