#practical demonkeeping

Pine Cove, California, is a little tourist trap town with a group of eccentric year-round residents. We follow many but in particular, Augustus the owner of the town’s bait and fine wine shop, Jenny and Robert, a young waitress and her drunk photographer ex(in progress)husband, Rachel, Pine Cove’s own coven leader, elderly couple, Amanda and Effram, and a few others before they, let’s say go to…

Pine Cove, California is a little tourist trap town with a group of eccentric year round residents. We follow many but in particular, Augustus the owner of the town's bait and fine wine shop, Jenny and Robert, a young waitress and her drunk photographer ex(in progress)husband, Rachel, Pine Cove's own coven leader, elderly couple, Amanda and Effram, and a few others before they, let's say go to dinner with the wrong someone.

One day, with the disappearance of the local drug dealer, and a strange incident in the night with all the dogs in town barking, and the appearance of a little man who drinks salt water, into town comes a mysterious young man. His name is Travis, and unbeknownst to the folks of Pine Cove, his travel companion is a demon from hell named Catch. Travis is in a mission to send Catch back where he came from, and Catxh is on a mission to ditch Travis and find someone who will let him wreak havoc, and Pine Cove is the stage for this showdown.

This is the first novel that Christopher Moore published. It's not the first one I read. That one was Lamb.

Although I have enjoyed all of Moore's books there are a few I didn't like as much.

This is one of them.

It's not that the book is bad, it's just that it doesn't have the feel that the later books do.

This one, especially at the beginning feels very cynical even for satire. The narration isn't just telling the reader about the characters, it's judging them. For the life of me, even after reading it a few times over the years, I cannot think of what it reminds me of, maybe Sienfeld? If the characters were a little less reprehensible?

I think that the point of this tone is to make commentary on the skeletons in the closets of even the most idyllic of places.

This one is just trying too hard to be satire.

It really really wants you to know that no one is free from corruption. The local mechanic bought his certifications and doesn't know what he's doing, the Saloon owner helps Pine Cove's resident pool shark hustle people, and waters down the booze. It isn't just Teavis who has a demon.

It softens a bit as you follow Travis, Jenny, and the other town's people, and it really feels like a Moore book when you get back stories on the characters, particularly Rachel (the leader of the local coven), the Dijin, and Travis.

And this makes perfect sense, because the strength in Moore's writing, in my non-expert opinion, is in the characters.

Yeah, it's amusing in this book when it is described how the people of Pine Cove mess with tourists.

But it's funny in Anima Rising when Judith turns Freud 's psychoanalysis on him and the two have a kind of Freudian Abbott and Costello routine.

This book is trying very hard to point out how absurd certain things are, the later books just have you follow characters and you watch how they act in, or cause the absurd situations.

And maybe because in those books, and even later on in this one, you know the why behind everything, the tone is far less cynical.

Christopher Moore is the author of fifteen novels, including the international bestsellers, Lamb, A Dirty Job and You Suck.

“Christopher Moore is the author of fifteen novels, including the international bestsellers, Lamb, A Dirty Job and You Suck. His lastest novel, Secondhand Souls, will be released in August 2015. Chris was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. His father was a highway patrolman and his mother sold major appliances at a department store. He attended Ohio State University and Brooks…

So I was digging through my storage bins, making sure I hadn’t accidentally bought the same book 3 different times [cause it’s happened before and it’ll probably happen again]

And I’m digging through and I realize I have way more Christopher Moore books than I thought I did

I had no clue I even owned Lamb and Coyote Blue

This is why we need to keep an updated list of books

[Under the cut are just notes of where I bought the other ones]