Thursday, May 05, 2011

Book 35: Bite Me

 
 If you've read Christopher Moore before, you know the type of humor to expect from this book - sometimes funny, sometimes on the juvenile side, almost always bizarre.  This is the third part of Moore's vampire trilogy (at least I think this is it), and begins about five weeks after You Suck ended.  Chet is a vampire cat and has accidentally created an army of vampire cats that hound the streets of San Franscisco and threaten the homeless of the city.  Jody and Flood are still bronzed, and unable to escape.  Jody can turn herself to mist and ignore her surroundings, but Tommy never learned that trick so he has been sitting there for five weeks, hungry, unable to move or speak, going crazy.  The cats have caused enough havoc to make headlines so that the vampire clean up crew once again has to return to San Franscisco to take matters into hand, while the two detective and the Animals are trying to engage in their own attack of the vampire cats.
 
Abbie Normal and Steve, the genius PhD student, also play parts in the novel - Steve's main role seems to be to explain things, and provide a scientific reason for everything.  Abbie first made an appearance in You Suck, and while she was irritating, she also wasn't that bad.  In this novel, however, Moore makes the unwise decision to give her too much face time.  The first twenty or so pages of the novel were a diary entry from Abbie with a quick summary of the previous novels of the series.  While it was a good way to refresh readers' memories of the previous novels, I also couldn't handle 20 pages straight of Abbie-speak.  Fortunately, she doesn't get that many pages at one time for the rest of the novel, but there isn't too much new about Jody and Tommy, and they aren't even together most of novel once they are freed from the bronze casting.  While I would have like to see Jody and Tommy more, I also feel like their story has been told: at the end of You Suck, they realized they were in love but wanted different things (to be vampire vs. to be human).  This issue still remains in this book.
 
Overall, it was entertaining, but not as good as the previous ones - too much Abbie, not enough about the cats, and really, Moore could have either left the series the way it had ended before, or simply had Jody and Tommy make their decision in the last novel instead of dragging it out another novel.

No comments: