Christopher Moore: You Suck

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I hadn't been sure that I would read this book next but did after all. The eventful weekend didn't leave room for much reading as I spent it trying to cheer up my newly become jobless sister. It took longer to read the book than I thought it would because of this but not for a lack of interest in reading it. I set it down with regret each time I had to lie the book aside.

Often a series might grow on me as I think was the case for this one, though its two companion books rather than a series from what I can tell. The characters grow on you and I love nothing more than books that follow another because you can stay with the characters who you have already begun to know and understand. In some ways this story was different because a new point of view was introduced but it never failed to make me laugh. I think I can say the story only got better.

This book takes place immediately following where its companion novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, leaves off. Vampires Jody and Tommy are still in San Francisco and with a few problems:

They need to find food, a priority to newly made vampire Tommy who is experiencing the hunger for the first time.

They need a new minion, or onion, if you ask Jody.

They need to find a new apartment to please the San Francisco police.

They need to go Christmas shopping for their parents because in all that had been going on, they've forgotten it's only about two days away.

Learning how to be a vampire and pushing a great huge statue down the street can be hard work but then again so can hiding on top of a pipe that heats up during the day. Being a statue for a living is the easy job, or so it is for one statue in particular. I won't reveal any more when it comes to that but its quite funny.

Through their adventures they find the strangest ways of acquiring food, searching for a way that their bodies can accept the coffee that satisfied them as humans. That comes in handy later on but I won't reveal why. Jody and Tommy get themselves a regular blood donor with little cost to them. A shaved cat in a red sweater is probably the one who pays the most.

Tommy's love for literature plays a role in checking 'minion' off their to-do list. Strange, amusing, Gothic, street-smart, and very much a teenager are some of best words of choice in describing Abby Normal who prefers to not use her day slave name. Abby more than happily becomes the loyal servant of her very old vampires, Flood and the Countess. Her only hope is to become one of them.

A woman named Blue comes into the story while spending time with the Animals, a nickname given to those who work Safeway's night shift. Tommy's old friends reveal to her that Tommy is a newly made vampire and from then on she has one goal: "'You want to be orange?' 'Not orange, you nitwit, a vampire!'" (Moore 162).

Only one of these girls becomes a vampire. Which one will it be? I will not say so you will have to find out yourself. This book is filled with just as much humor as the last book and I enjoyed it a bit more. Moore does a brilliant job capturing the point of view of the sixteen-year-old that is Abby Normal. I don't feel he could have done any better on that. I kind of missed a few things that couldn't be in this book that had been a part of the one previous but the author more than makes up for it. Hysterical!

I've loaned both books out to someone who is reading them as quickly as the murdering vampire of San Francisco seemed to be draining bodies of their blood in the first of these two books. She is ecstatic and loving the series, the first vampire books she has ever read. The amount of humor in these books just has her so drug into these books. I see books grab at her attention on a regular basis, but these two are not books the nonfiction reader I know her to be would pick up to read on her own. I think that says something more for these two books.