Christopher Moore's Blog

Richard Brautigan, Douglas Adams, and now Hunter Thompson. My heroes have always been writers. And even though I never met these guys, never shared a meal, never wrote a letter to them, when they pass, it rattles my soul.

As a writer, you’re always looking for a map, some sort of guide to tell you that you’re on the right track. There’s no one to ask, so you pick up a novel and you read the miniscule bio on the dust jacket and you try to see if maybe there’s something there that resonates with you’re own experience. (For years it was looking for how old the author was when he published his first book.)

I remember reading Brautigan in high school, Trout Fishing in America. I read it in one night, and the next morning I ran into the home room of my favorite English teacher waving the book basically screaming, “What the fuck is this? Can you do this?”

“It’s social satire,” said a patient Mr. Hatfield. He smiled then, didn’t say anything — after all, he was the guy who busted me for reading The Man With the Golden Gun behind the cover of The Sun Also Rises and gave the same smile.

A couple of years later, I loaned a big book of bizarre paintings to a guy named Rusty who I worked with at the grocery store. Hieronymous Bosch, Peter Bruegal, Dali, Magritte,Goya: guys like that. Rusty gave me a little book called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Who knew how appropriate a trade:Hieronymous Bosch for Hunter S. Thompson?

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

And so it began. Grown-ups not only behaved this way, but they could write about it in really, really funny ways. A door opened for me.

I’d cut my teeth on Mad Magazine and The Catcher in the Rye. My first album wasn’t The Beatles, or The Stones, or the Jackson Five, like most of my friends, it was Class Clown by George Carlin. At age twelve or so I started tumbling down a staircase of comic virtuosity, hitting every step on the way down. Cheech and Chong, National Lampoon, Richard Pryor, Saturday Night Live – I wish I could say that all of my influences were writers, but in fact, they were just the people who made me laugh, and up to that point, I had never laughed like I did at Hunter S. Thompson’s book.

Later I would go back to Brautigan, find a Connecticut General from Big Sur, and the amazing, bizarre, hilarious plague of frogs, and find the true humor in that psychopath’s voice. Then I’d stumble across a strange book by a Baroque Brit called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I picked up based on title alone, and which influenced me later to title my own first book as a pseudo how-to), but it was Thompson’s Fear and Loathing that first gave me permission, if you will, to be a nut-case on the page.

Did you know that Thompson and Brautigan were contemporaries in Big Sur in the early sixties? Thompson the caretaker of what eventually would become The Esalen Institute, Brautigan a indigent hippie picking up cigarette butts on Highway One to make roll-your owns and living in a rattle-trap cabin up in the woods. I don’t know if they knew each other, but they were, in many ways, on parallel paths. They both had affinities for alcohol, tobacco and firearms, (I like to think that somewhere, in an especially ironic circle of Hell, Brautigan and Thompson run the entire bureau of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms). They were both on the edge and at the top of their fields, at a given time. Brautigan in poetry, Thompson in journalism. And they both blew their brains out in their remote homes.

I’m sure that it wouldn’t have made any difference to either of them that they inspired and enabled a mid-list comic novelist, and Brautigan sprayed his cerebral Rustoleum all over the walls long before I published my first book, but somehow I feel like they should have known. Like I should have sent a thank-you note. There’s a profound and palpable sense of loss.

I once asked Tim Cahill, who in 1974 went to Washington with Hunter Thompson to interview Howard Baker for Rolling Stone, what it was like to hang out with Thompson. He answered:

“Well, the first four hours of absolute craziness is a lot of fun. Then the second four hours of absolute craziness begins to get tiring. Then, by the third four hours of absolute craziness, you never want to see him again as long as you live.”

Imagine sixty-seven years of it…

Maybe it even got to be too much for Hunter.

So I watched Alien vs. Predator last night, and I give it four big claws up. As with the last movie from video game I watched, Resident Evil Apocalypse, it totally rocked. Massive violence, cool alien stuff, cool Predator gadgets, plucky and resourceful girl hero. And as Joe Bob used to say, “No plot to get in the way of the story.”

But there’s got to be a political metaphor there somewhere. Are the aliens the Democrats, the Predators the Republicans, and the humans the hapless voters? Hmmm.

(Spoilers abound below.)

After all, I think the Aliens just want to kill people to eat them and use them for incubators for their young. They will kill and eat and cocoon anyone. Everyone is equal. They will slime you and punch a hole in your scull with that little mini-mouth, but presumably they will come back and eat you later, so you’re not wasted. I can’t remember if they ever say in any of the movies that they eat us, but I believe that at some point in one of the movies Sigourney says, “They’re coming where the meat is,” so I’m assuming. So basically, they are just about taking care of their people.

(I’m really surprised, however, that someone hasn’t tried to use an antihistimine on them. I mean, there is snot dripping off those guys twenty-four seven. You’d have to eat like a kid and half a day just to keep up your mucus production. I’m just saying, next time a mad doctor or secret android guy captures one of the aliens, they should slip him a Benedryl and see if he just dries up. Or, who knows, cheers up.)

So, you have the aliens who are not concerned in the least with the cost of things, they are just interested in the well-being of the hive.

Then you have the Predators. To them, you’re really irrelevant unless you’re violent, or appear to be violent, or you can help them out. They might save your spinal cord and your scull for a trophy, but they really don’t care what happens to you as long as they can justify killing you with a cool and expensive gadget. Pretty much the Republican platform, right there.

The Predators are so rich, and so bored, that they exercise dominance over whole populations, just so they can entertain themselves with their favorite sport, which is killing stuff. Now, here the metaphor breaks down a little, because the priorities are switched. Republicans only kill populations so they can participate in their favorite sport, which is making huge amounts of money, so they can buy cool gadgets to kill stuff with. Predators don’t seem to care about money.

So, here’s the really hopeful message of Alien vs. Predator. At some point, the humans have to choose a side, and the way they do this is ….wait for it…. by giving a weapon to the Predator! And who gives it to them, but an African American woman, who then joins ranks with the Predator to battle the evil Alien queen. Oh my god, that’s not mucus the aliens are dripping, that’s irony.

(And here’s the big spoiler, but the real truth to it all…)

After the human chick helps them defeat the aliens, the Predators hand her a spear, get into five — count ’em –five ginormous spaceships, and leave her stranded in the middle of Antartica without a coat.

As they fly off, with a tear in her eye, she says, “But you said you would leave no child behind.”

She didn’t really say that, I’m just fuckin’ with you.

I have to go take a Benedryl. I’m feeling mucussy.

Hug My Face

Author Christopher Moore gets ‘Alien’ for Valentine’s

By David Templeton

Christopher Moore has some very hot plans for Valentine’s Day.

I’ve just contacted the bestselling author to extract his views on what constitutes the perfect movie for a romantic evening. According to Moore–who this year will be marking the 10th consecutive Valentine’s spent with the woman he refers to as his “wifelike girlfriend”–such movies must be chosen very carefully. For example, to celebrate their upcoming 10th anniversary, Moore and his mate plan to watch a double feature of Alien vs. Predator and Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

“We’ll eat Thai green curry, and then I will present her with some tastefully nasty lingerie,” Moore reveals. “She will, in turn, present me with something dark and disgustingly chocolate, with no regard to my zealous, albeit recent, dedication to the South Beach diet. We’ll finish the evening discussing the parallels between the aforementioned films and the Teutonic epics, with an eye toward also including the themes of Beowulf and Oedipus Rex–since both of those seem to reverberate through the Alien series.”

Moore is aware that to some people, his atypical Valentine’s Day plans seem a bit unromantic. Screw ’em. Such people, Moore believes, clearly don’t have access to really good green curry paste and 5.1 surround sound.

“My wifelike girlfriend likes splashy sci-fi horror films, and I love her for that,” he brags. “In our relationship, those kinds of movies were established as a specialty date early on, when we decided to spend our first New Year’s Eve together at home watching Species. It works for us.'”

Moore–who lives on the island of Kauai–has authored a whole slew of atypical novels, beginning with Practical Demonkeeping and including the bestsellers Fluke, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Bloodsucking Fiends (a steamy romance about young vampires), Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal and his most recent, The Stupidest Angel, about an invasion of zombies on Christmas Eve. While no one would accuse Moore of being a writer of romances, it’s true that for all the demons, monsters, yetis, spirits, angels and sea mutants in his stories, his books are frequently quite sexy and remarkably optimistic regarding the transformational power of love. That said, Moore believes that, for the average American male, Valentine’s Day sucks.

“Sure, if a guy is in the courting stage, Valentine’s Day can be a chance to look good for the girl he’s wooing, to show his creativity and perception,” Moore counsels, “but for the guy in the long, committed relationship, Valentine’s Day is simply a pitfall, like anniversaries or other holidays that he’ll get in trouble for if he forgets.”

When compared to women, Moore says, guys rarely grow quarrelsome when their partner forgets to give them goodies on Valentine’s Day, and when it comes to the goodies most guys really want, they are ridiculously easy to please.

“I remember shopping for jewelry for my girlfriend with the help of a woman friend,” he explains. “When I asked her, ‘So what are you going to get Tom for Valentine’s?’ she said, ‘I’m going to take off my top.’

“Ironic, isn’t it,” Moore says, “that women–who love to shop–really never need to.”

But back to the subject of movies. Moore has observed that when a guy is choosing a movie around which to build a romantic evening, the most important thing to remember is this: avoid all movies featuring Angelina Jolie.

“Angelina is especially threatening because she’s actually crazy enough to have hooked up with a homely old guy who is clearly not in her league, and therefore perpetuates ridiculous hope in the minds of men,” he explains. “It’s tough to generalize here, but in my experience, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman generally get a pass from most women. Those actresses don’t, for some reason, present much of a threat. But for reasons that are almost equally obscure to me, Michelle Pfeiffer, Heather Graham, Carmen Electra and the anti-Christ of female competition, Pamela Anderson, will do nothing but put a woman in a foul mood.”

Are you listening, gentlemen? No Angelina. No Michelle. No Pamela. This is serious.

“I’m convinced,” Moore says, “that Pam Anderson’s breasts are the most ominous and threatening orbs since the wicked witch’s crystal ball. The guy who brings Barb Wire or Scarface home for Valentine’s may as well have mothballs for testicles, because his equipment is officially in storage for the duration.”

A pretty extensive interview with the people at Powell’s. It’s transcribed from an audio interview, so if I seem incoherrent at times, it’s because I am…

http://www.powells.com/authors/moore.html

Just wanted to wish you guys a merry Christmas.

Thanks for getting behind The Stupidest Angel.

Hey kids, I’m going to be on Talk of the Nation on NPR this Thursday. I guess they’ll be asking me about Stupidest Angel. Details for broadcast in your area at www.npr.org They also have a full audio archive, here’s the link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4242718

I’m thinking that you guys may have better things to do than listen to my dumb ass on the radio two days before Christmas.

You guys, while I’ll be on tour for the next couple of weeks, I’ve left a bunch of the signed bookplates in Hawaii for those of you who don’t live in tour cities, but want to give signed copies for Christmas.

So, as before, just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope and a brief note saying how many you need to:

Christopher Moore P.O. Box 111 Kilauea, HI 96754

Joe Kurmaski (The Metal Cowboy, fun bicycle touring books, like Charles Kuralt on a bike) will be putting these questions in the Oregonian in a very different form some time next week, but in the mean time, thought I’d share them with you guys.

1. Q: Do you always start with an idea for a story or do you work the story line out of a specific character? How did it work this time – with Stupidest Angel?

I usually start with a concept, something like: “What would happen if an angel came to earth to grant a Christmas wish, but really screwed it up?” Then I fill in with characters, creating each one so that I have someone to carry the story. Often I’ll create characters who have specific problems to overcome, because generally I think that we all do and readers relate to people who aren’t perfect. With this book, I’d already created the characters for other books, so I just sort of put them in a new play in the same setting I’d used in two of my previous books, Pine Cove, California.

2. Why a Christmas theme? beyond your agent suggesting it.

Actually it was suggested by a sales rep from my publisher, but when I started thinking about it, I thought it would be a lot of fun, and if I used a familiar setting that didn’t require research, it would be something that I could write pretty quickly and so get a new book into the hands of my readers who are always dogging me to write faster.

How’d you decide what part of the Christmas story to take on – the miracle angle works, did you start with it or get inspired along the way?

I started with the miracle and the angel, but along the way I wanted to brush with other classic Christmas themes: wish fulfillment, the coming together of a small town, the Gift of the Magi, the misunderstood Scrooge — basically I had everything but a freezing little match girl, and I would have done that if I’d remembered it. Then, once I had all the themes, I decided to twist them in a funny way.

3. How did you decide which characters to encore from previous books?

The angel from Lamb was in immediately because he gave me the whole “It’s a Wonderful Life” aspect, and most of the other characters were from my other Pine Cove books and had their own built-in idiosyncrasies, but the decision to include the pilot Tucker Case and his pet fruit bat Roberto came exclusively from readers, who continually asked me to bring Roberto back in another book. Over all, though, I wanted the book to work for you if you’d never read anything else I’d ever written, and from what people tell me, it does. It’s sort of a Whitman sampler of what I do.

4. Is there a warrior babe of the outland outside of your imagination?

Actually, The Warrior Babe is based on the notion of what happens to a cult-B-movie babe when her career is over. I met a couple of actresses who were selling autographed photographs at a science fiction convention a few years ago, and I thought exploring someone who played such an assertive character, but whose career ended right about the time that most personality disorders start to manifest themselves (late twenties, early thirties) would be interesting and possibly very funny. It was sort of my way of exploring the “Where are they Now” of the low budget scream queen. I actually like the idea of a world with warrior babes running around in it.

5. What’s next?

Death. I’m writing a book about death. You know, a comedy. Over the last few years I’ve cared for a couple of dying people and I think I have some stuff to say about it.

6. The pacing in The Stupidest Angel really gives the comedy even more punch and bite than the usually laugh out loud quality of your work – less is moore? Did you take a page out of elmore l’s brevity play book for this project?

I knew from the concept of the project that it would have to be short, and it actually was about fifty pages longer than I would have liked. Strangely enough, one of the reasons was that I wanted it to be affordable for people to give as a gift, and so it was going to be in small format to keep the price down. I don’t think this hurt the story, and I didn’t feel constrained at all, because I knew as I planned the book that it was going to be short — more like a three-act play than a five-act play. It’s actually about the same length as my first book, Practical Demonkeeping, which was also set in Pine Cove.

7. What’s the true meaning of Christmas?

Well, having done a whole bunch of research for a Jesus book that I wrote a few years ago, and therefore knowing that Christmas has nothing whatever to do with the historical birth of Christ, I’d have to say that the best way to honor the “meaning” of Christmas is with a spirit of peace, generosity, and forgiveness, because these are things the man for whom the holiday is named stood for. Of course that was before he became a Republican. Evidently now he just wants to bomb the bejeezus out of Iraq and keep Gay people from getting married.

8. After readers have purchased all of your previous books for the holidays, what other authors would you suggest under the tree?

I think you’re always safe with a book by David Sedaris, Carl Hiaasen, or Dave Barry. No one is going to be unhappy with a book that makes them laugh. If they haven’t read Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegutt, or the comic work of John Steinbeck, then what a fantastic gift you can give them. I envy a person who has never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, or Breakfast of Champions, or Cannery Row, who gets to discover how much fun a book can be over Christmas break. You turn someone on to those books and they’ll never forget you.

9. Are there any smart angels or worldly cherubs roaming around out there – or do they all see us and the world we’ve created in very literal terms?

I just don’t know. Above all, I write stuff that I hope is funny, and a stupid creature who is powerful, beautiful, and divine is just funnier to me than a smart one. I like the angels in Gregory Widen’s Prophecy movies a lot too, and they are far smarter and scarier than any angel I’ve every written about.

Spence Kelly is a JAG in Afghanistan. He just got his copy of TSA and wanted to share with you guys.

I do like the juxtaposition of the M-4, the pistol, and the peace sign.

Here’s to you guys who are overseas for Thanksgiving. We’re thinking of you.

By the way, your Commander in Chief is still a fucktard. But you guys are in our hearts and prayers.

Since the election, since the media announced a major coup in the culture war, since President Bush declared a two percent win a mandate, since the head of Focus on the Family started to dictate who will chose our judges, I’ve been thinking. And I think that we all know that no good can come of that. Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

Anger, Denial, Depression, Bargaining, and Acceptance. The Kubler-Rossities of life and death — the five steps of dying, and so often, the five steps one goes through when anything comes to an end. (Who can forget the Anger, Denial, Bargaining and Acceptance that we all went through last season, when Friends and Sex in the City went off the air? We thought that water cooler chat would be nothing but uncomfortable silence — nothing to distract us from staring at the birthmark over the eye of that skinny guy in accounting, now that we couldn’t discuss Jennifer’s new hair-do or who Kim Cattrell blew this week. But alas, life, did, indeed go on. And can’t they take those things off with lasers now? It looks like someone paint-balled him in the temple, gangland style, for Christ’s sake.) So since Tuesday night, I’ve been going through the stages.

Anger. I yelled at the weather, my girlfriend, the roosters in the yard, the lawn mower, the TV (a lot), and some random passers-by who had the bad judgment to drive down my street in a suspiciously Red State-looking rental car. I wrote rants (see previous posts), essays, eulogies (death of hope, justice, intelligence) polemics, and what I think is a new genre, liberal white whines. Friends and I worked ourselves into a frenzy over the phone, something akin to Christian charismatics being “taken with the spirit”, speaking in tongues, daring the Rove vipers to bite us, as we invoked the names of Jefferson, Madison, and Hillary in order to cast out the evil, flight-suited cheerleader. Possessed by the holy ghost of righteous indignation and free evening and weekend minutes were we, and we were pissed.

But no, it couldn’t have really happened? There’s just no way it could have happened. Too many cared, too many turned out, too many saw through the lies. There had to have been a mistake. Oh what dangerous rapids we did ford o’er that most treacherous of Egyptian rivers, the great Blue de-Nile. Nearly drown, we were, in denial. I noticed a lot of nodding among us, as if we could reassuringly bobble-head our way to salvation, if we only agreed with each other hard enough. Alas, we were but passengers in the back window of a stinking cab piloted by a crazed Arab with an RPG and a younger, leaner, hungrier God than our own. No paperless trail would reveal the mistakes, no deus ex machina would righteously pluck the poser out of the palace, we were, most inexorably, fucked.

Then depression set in. There was a fatalistic “to hell with it” among the defeated. Phone messages were mumbled, voices trailed off, everything seemed unimportant in the face of our collective misery. But it was collective misery. We had company! There was a reason that you can dance to the Blues, that you can make love to the Blues, that you can rejoice at the Blues. It’s the commonality of spirit, the shared suffering, the release of grief — keening through twelve-bar progressions in the key of glee. (So that’s why Black people — used to this shit by now — sounded so happy at church, sang so pretty at funerals, and invented the Blues. Nice of them to share. About time we understood.) We found, knew, and became in a single lament. We were the Blues.

Lawd have mercy, if I’d not been born without rhythm and melodically challenged I mighta’ composed me a requiem for a dream, but instead you get this toneless tocatta for a nightmare. (That can happen, by the way, nightmares, if you eat a tocatta right before bed. Particularly a cream cheese tocatta. I’m just sayin’.)

And thus the bargaining began – not with God or man, but with ourselves, as we tried to somehow set the terms that would make it, perhaps not all better, but tolerable. They would see, when enough farm boys were ground up in the desert of Iraq, teenage girls were squatting over coat hangers in alleys, when their grandchildren were born owing enough to buy a Yankees center fielder, when the trees were gone, the air was brown, when they were all dressed in rough-cut burlap and Broadway was silent because all the Gays went to Canada — then we would show them the face of righteous social justice. We would rescue them, let them beg us to take our country back and run it for them. Apologize, they would. Dig a giant hole and drop all things Bush into it, covered with concrete and imprinted with warnings to future generations to never ever dig them up. The name Bush would be expunged from all documents, and chiseled from our monuments, like Aknatan, the Pharaoh who dared bring mono-theism to the Eqyptians, whose name uttered aloud brought down a death sentence for a five-hundred years after his execution. Even arboreal reference would be forbidden, so in the land of the free we would have to merrily go round the mulberry shrub, and a woman’s pubic patch would ever be know as a curl-meadow. Only then, then we might feel better.

Or we could move to New Zealand. For days you could walk up to any random Blue-stater and get a price quote on a three bed, two bath in Auckland, Sidney, or Vancouver. (Toronto’s too cold and Montreal is, well, it’s Fucking French, isn’t it? I mean, at least with the French in France you get France, but French in an Ohio-like setting? Don’t think so. And fuck me, I only know how to say orange juice and pizza in French. How am I gonna be culturally elite?) But with no binding arbitration by a vengeful God willing to smite the shit out people using his name for their own political ends, the bargaining broke down,.

So can we move to the final stage, acceptance?

I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. And what I’ve come up with, after much pondering, and with consideration of the teachers in Oregon who were arrested for wearing “protect our civil rights” shirts, and the kid in Missouri who was arrested for posting a “If George Bush is King, Off With His Head” bumper sticker on his car, and with no little concern over that F.B.I. computer program called Carnivore (Atkins Diet-based program), which scans the internet for threatening language…

I’d like to make a modest proposal…

AN IMMEDIATE CHEERFUL OVERTHROW OF THE US GOVERNMENT

Let’s go, people. Let’s see a great big smile, you’re on camera. The revolution will definitely be televised.

[Editor’s note: The photos of Chris’s torture by guards at Gitmo are still on the way, but he wanted me to let you know that when you see the redneck chick pointing to his genitals, the look you’re seeing on her face is not mocking, it’s shock and awe, baby, shock and awe. ‘ target=’_blank’>