"I was supposed to be famous by the time I was 30, right? Well, I wasn't," wrote the author, who visits Bay Book Company on Friday, in a first-person publicity sketch penned for his maniacally merry new book, "You Suck, A Love Story."
"I was a waiter at the Harmony Pasta Factory (Harmony, Calif., has a population ... of 18 and four cows)," he went on. "So I thought I better write a book."
 Author Christopher Moore will be at Bay Book Company in the Strawflower Village beginning at 7 p.m. Friday. |
So Moore thought he'd stick to writing. He discovered an innate knack for humor, and nursed a lifelong interest in horror, the supernatural and the otherworldly, thanks in part to influences like Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut.
In time, the unlikely bedfellows - humor and horror - proved winning for Moore. His string of otherworldly novels are all optioned for film rights, he says, though none have yet hit the screen.
His latest, "You Suck, A Love Story" (William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, $21.95), about the travails of teen vampires in love, will be the topic of his visit to Bay Book from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 19.
"Christopher Moore has truly been one of my favorite authors for well over a decade," said Bay Book owner Kevin Magee. "Undoubtedly my favorite comedic writer ... Perhaps if you combine Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen and Bill Bryson with Douglas Adams, you could imagine a Christopher Moore."
In this novel, penned in a colloquial style full of the tone and language of the young set, 19-year-old C. Thomas "Tommy" Flood has a problem: he slept with his witty, pretty girlfriend Jody.
The problem? She's a vampire, and so he is too.
He must now get accustomed to a new life, beginning with dealing with sharpened vampire senses and recruiting a local wino for late-night snacks and a young Goth girl as a personal gofer. That should appeal to her, fond as she is of the world of darkness.
He can handle all that, but he must also avoid the police, steer clear of his former frozen-turkey-bowling friends and deal with a centuries-old vampire who got Jody into his world and wants to pick up where he left off.
Bizarre and hysterically funny? That's Moore.
"(Humor and horror) work pretty well together," he said by phone from San Francisco, which is his home when he isn't living in Hawaii. "I tell funny stories that have a supernatural element. People's heads cock like, 'What's that?' But it's no effort to fit into the genre."
He followed "Practical Demonkeeping," with several novels that flirted with the dark side - or familiar territory, like "Lamb," about the life of Christ from the perspective of his boyhood pal Biff, or the maritime "Fluke, or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings."
He recalls a 1983 epiphany that showed him where his talents lay. He was reading his horror prose at a Santa Barbara writers' conference, when he heard listeners giggling.
"I wasn't scaring audiences. They were cracking up," he said. "(Humor) must be what I do."
And now, "It's more important to me to be funny, but say it as supernatural."
Who reads his work? His typical reader, he says, is a 37-year-old divorced trauma nurse who's a single mom, stressed at work and needs a break.
He says he never formally studied writing, and in fact bemoans structured writing studies as dangerous to spontaneity. He urges writers to "Write stories. Have fun. Entertain," rather than trying to create literature.
His education comes from some university-level extension courses. He draws his characterizations, at least mortal ones, from people he has known or read about. Or, in Tommy's case, "he's an analog of me at 19."
But otherwise, he said, "It's all about imagination," and techniques similar to what an actor might use.
"I put myself into the space of the character and pull from my own senses and experience," he said.
However does it, editors like it.
"Moore writes with the jittery energy of a brilliant, charming class clown, mixing sex and gore and a potty mouth with a goofy-sweet sensibility," said Publishers' Weekly.
"Where has this guy been hiding?" queried the New York Times.
He'll come out of hiding Friday at Bay Book, which can be reached at 726-3488.
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AT A GLANCE
What: Author visit with Christopher Moore
Where: Bay Book Company, Strawflower Village, Half Moon Bay
When: 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 19
Cost: Free
Information: 726-3488
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