Christopher Moore, You Suck [Library of Babel]

Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is probably my favorite of his books. It is a silly book, about the romance between Tommy Flood, a naive would-be writer from Nebraska, and Jody Stroud, a young woman in San Francisco who finds herself turned into a vampire. It's an extremely funny book, with adventures involving homicide cops, the Emperor of San Francisco, and a manic team of late-night stockboys from the local Safeway, and everything just clicks.

I was a little nervous when I heard that he had written a sequel. Plenty of authors have gone back to follow up a beloved classic, and ruined two books in the process. Bloodsucking Fiends has an open-ended ending, but not in a way that really demands a sequel. The possibility is there, but there's no immediate need for one, and the risk of failure is pretty high.

Nevertheless, You Suck: A Love Story is here, and it's a very direct sequel, starting about twenty-four hours after the end of Bloodsucking Fiends. I'll put the plot-specific stuff below the fold, for the sake of anyone who might worry about reading spoilers for a deeply silly vampire romance, but I'm happy to say that this isn't a book-wrecking sequel. Moore follows the rules for movie sequels, in making the plot of this book bigger and wilder than the previous, but it's a very credible sequel, and good fun in its own right. You shouldn't read it without reading Bloodsucking Fiends first, but you could do a lot worse than going out and buying both of them right now.

(Go on. We'll wait...)

At the end of Bloodsucking Fiends, Jody reappeared in Tommy's apartment, and was about to turn him into a vampire himself, so they could be together forever. You Suck begins with Tommy's awakening as a vampire. He's one of the undead now, but his basic character hasn't changed:

"Tommy, we need to find a daytime person to help us. We have to move out of this place."

"I've been thinking about Alaska."

"Okay, good for you, but we still need to find a place to live where the Animals and Inspector Rivera can't find us."

"No, I'm thinking we should move to Alaska. For one thing, in the winter, it's dark for like twenty hours a day, so we'd have plenty of time. And I read somewhere that Eskimos put their old people out on the ice when they're ready to die. It would be like people were leaving snacks out for us."

Finding a daytime helper turns out to be relatively easy (she's a somewhat perky Goth teen calling herself "Abby Normal," and bits of the plot are told through her diary), but good help and a new home are the least of their problems. Tommy's old colleagues from the night shift at the Safeway are back, accompanied by an extremely expensive blue-dyed call girl from Las Vegas, and they (or, rather, she) wants Tommy and Jody. And Inspectors Rviera and Cavuto, the homicide cops who tracked Jody in the first book are sniffing around again. And, of course, there's still the original vampire who turned Jody, who's not all that happy about having been bronzed.

Tommy and Jody have to navigate all these perils, plus find themselves a reliable source of food, in order to keep themselves... undead. And, this being a Christopher Moore novel, complications multiply before everything comes together for the big ending.

I'm not entirely happy with the way the book ends-- there's a bit of a deus ex machina quality to one part of it-- but it's not a travesty. And the process of getting there is a hoot-- it took heroic effort on my part to refrain from reading bits aloud to Kate yesterday while she was trying to work, and that's a good sign for a silly book.