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Summary
Summary
It s Christmastime in Pine Cove. Lena Marquez rings the bell for the Salvation Army, and when ex-husband Dale Pearson won t part with his pocket change, she decides to exact revenge. Meanwhile, while rushing home from a friend s house in the dark one night, little Joshua Barker, age seven, sees a woman kill Santa with a shovel only it wasn t Santa; it was Dale.) A small boy makes a simple Christmas wish: Please, Santa, come back from the dead. The angel Raziel, not the brightest halo in heaven, is sent to Earth and accidentally revives the entire Pine Cove graveyard. Now under attack by the undead, the town has to put aside differences, bind together, and discover the true meaning of Christmas spirit. "
Author Notes
Christopher Moore was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1957. He studied at Ohio State University and Brooks Institute of Photography. Before becoming a full-time author, he worked as a roofer, a grocery clerk, a hotel night auditor, an insurance broker, a waiter, a photographer, and a DJ. His first book, Practical Demonkeeping, was published in 1992. His other works include Bloodsucking Fiends, Island of the Sequined Nun, Lamb, A Dirty Job, You Suck, Fool, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art, and Secondhand Souls. In 2014 his title, The Serpent of Venice, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This audiobook starts off innocently enough-with a few minutes of bright, punchy Christmas music-but as we meet each resident of Pine Cove, Calif., the story bends, becoming as twisted as an image in a funhouse mirror. Lena Marquez is the sanest of the bunch, even if she does have a habit of wreaking violence on her ex-husband, known here as the "Evil Developer." Then there's Lena's best friend Molly, a former B-movie actress who hears voices, occasionally believes herself to be "The Warrior Babe of the Outland" and is married to the town constable, Theo, a former pot addict who's slipping off the wagon. To top that off, there's Tucker, a lonely pilot who has a Micronesian fruit bat for a pet, and a rather witless archangel named Raziel who comes to Earth to grant one boy's Christmas wish. It is that wish which turns this Christmas comedy into a holiday horror story. Roberts narrates the whole affair with skill, using his warm, hearty voice to great effect. His is the kind of voice that one would expect to hear in the audio version of A Christmas Carol or a children's storybook, which makes him the perfect reader for this book since it is, in part, a parody of the Christmas classics-albeit a gruesomely entertaining one. Whether crooning a few bars of the blues, personifying the dead or delivering one of the story's uplifting messages ("Life is messy. People generally suck"), Roberts's velvet voice rings with mirth, accentuating the humor and absurdity of each moment. Simultaneous release with the Morrow hardcover (Forecasts, Oct. 4). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Pine Cove is a sleepy Californian coastal village with more art galleries than gas stations, in which everyone drives an SUV. When young Josh Barker witnesses Santa being murdered, or rather, when he sees evil developer Dale Pearson, playing the town's Santa in the Christmas parade, being dispatched by his ex-wife's shovel . . . well, things get complicated. Combine the boy's earnest wish that Santa return from the grave with the best intentions of the stupidest angel in all creation and this Christmas in Pine Cove is certainly going to be one to remember. Dealing with the fallout from the angel's attempts to provide a festive miracle are a cop who has promised to stay off drugs if his sword-wielding lover will keep on taking hers, a Drugs Enforcement Administration pilot with a talking fruit bat, and a biologist with a penchant for mating rodents. Pacy and engaging, this is a comic fantasy crammed with sharp and funny one-liners from the man who has previously come up with the memorably titled Island of the Sequined Love Nun and The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove . Caption: article-four.1 Pine Cove is a sleepy Californian coastal village with more art galleries than gas stations, in which everyone drives an SUV. When young Josh Barker witnesses Santa being murdered, or rather, when he sees evil developer Dale Pearson, playing the town's Santa in the Christmas parade, being dispatched by his ex-wife's shovel . . . well, things get complicated. - Keith Brooke.
Booklist Review
Readers of The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (1999), the cast of which returns in this yarn, will confirm that, if any town could put the eerie back in Merry Christmas (whaddaya mean it's never been there--aintcha read Dickens?), it would be Moore's cut-rate California coastal paradise, Pine Cove. It all begins a few chapters in, when Dale Pearson accosts his ex, Lena Marquez, while she is stealing Christmas trees and ends up with a shovel-blade in the neck. Seven-year-old Josh Barker glimpses Dale's demise and, since Dale has on his Caribou Lodge Santa suit, assumes the jolly old elf's been offed; his Christmas wish becomes to have Santa back. Unfortunately, dim-bulb angel Raziel has drawn angelic Christmas duty, which is to grant one child's Christmas wish, and eventually (nothing is ever in a hurry in Moore's lurching, Margaritaville version of the world, though it reads fast) Dale/Santa is resurrected, along with quite a contingent from the same graveyard, just in time for the Christmas party in the nearby chapel. Delirious! --Ray Olson Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Moore's (Fluke) latest novel begins as a riff on A Christmas Carol, with Christmas itself cast in the role of Marley's ghost, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine scent, and "threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe." In the role of Scrooge is Dale Pearson, a land developer in Pine Cove, CA. When dressed as Santa Dale gets dispatched with a shovel, in full view of a youngster, it's clear we're not in Dickens country any more. Of course, resurrection (of a sort) is possible, hence the zombies who infest the latter half of this brief novel. Moore fans will welcome the return of favorites like the angel Raziel from Lamb, fans of mindless humor will find much to enjoy, and literary types can pick out allusions like raisins (Malcolm Cowley is an antiquarian bookseller addicted to rotten flesh and IKEA furniture). A Christmas pudding of a book, offering something for everyone, short perhaps of those who tear up at the thought of yet another viewing of It's a Wonderful Life. This is the perfect complement to December book displays for most public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/04.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Stupidest Angel A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, Version 2.0 Chapter One Christmas Creeps Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe. Pine Cove, her pseudo-Tudor architecture all tarted up in holiday quaintage -- twinkle lights in all the trees along Cypress Street, fake snow blown into the corner of every shop's windows, miniature Santas and giant candles hovering illuminated beneath every streetlight-- opened to the droves of tourists from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Central Valley searching for a truly meaningful moment of Christmas commerce. Pine Cove, sleepy California coastal village -- a toy town, really, with more art galleries than gas stations, more wine-tasting rooms than hardware stores -- lay there, as inviting as a drunken prom queen, as Christmas loomed, only five days away. Christmas was coming, and with Christmas this year, would come the Child. Both were vast and irresistible, and miraculous. Pine Cove was expecting only one of the two. Which is not to say that the locals didn't get into the Christmas spirit. The two weeks before and after Christmas provided a welcome wave of cash into the town's coffers, tourist-starved since summer. Every waitress dusted off her Santa hat and clip-on reindeer antlers and checked to make sure that there were four good pens in her apron. Hotel clerks steeled themselves for the rage of last-minute overbookings, while housekeepers switched from their normal putrid baby-powder air fresheners to a more festive putrid pine and cinnamon. Down at the Pine Cove Boutique they put a "Holiday Special" sign on the hideous reindeer sweater and marked it up for the tenth consecutive year. The Elks,Moose, Masons, and VFWs, who were basically the same bunch of drunk old guys, planned furiously for their annual Christmas parade down Cypress Street, the theme of which this year would be Patriotism in the Bed of a Pickup (mainly because that had been the theme of their Fourth of July parade and everyone still had the decorations). Many Pine Covers even volunteered to man the Salvation Army kettles down in front of the post office and the Thrifty-Mart in two-hour shifts, sixteen hours a day. Dressed in their red suits and fake beards, they rang their bells like they were going for dog-spit gold at the Pavlov Olympics. "Give up the cash, you cheap son of a bitch," said Lena Marquez, who was working the kettle that Monday, five days before Christmas. Lena was following Dale Pearson, Pine Cove's evil developer, through the parking lot, ringing the bejeezus out of him as he headed for his truck. On his way into the Thrifty-Mart, he'd nodded to her and said, "Catch you on the way out," but when he emerged eight minutes later, carrying a sack of groceries and a bag of ice, he blew by her kettle like she was using it to render tallow from building inspectors' butts and he needed to escape the stench. "It's not like you can't afford a couple of bucks for the less fortunate." She rang her bell especially hard right by his ear and he spun around, swinging the bag of ice at her about hip level. Lena jumped back. She was thirty-eight, lean, darkskinned, with the delicate neck and finely set jawline of a flamenco dancer; her long black hair was coiled into two Princess Leia cinnabuns on either side of her Santa hat. "You can't take a swing at Santa! That's wrong in so many ways that I don't have time to enumerate them." "You mean to count them," Dale said, the soft winter sunlight glinting off a new set of veneers he'd just had installed on his front teeth. He was fifty-two, almost completely bald, and had strong carpenter's shoulders that were still wide and square, despite the beer gut hanging below. "I mean it's wrong -- you're wrong -- and you're cheap," and with that Lena put the bell next to his ear again and shook it like a red-suited terrier shaking the life out of a screaming brass rat. Dale cringed at the sound and swung the ten-pound bag of ice in a great underhanded arc that caught Lena in the solar plexus and sent her backpedaling across the parking lot, gasping for breath. That's when the ladies at BULGES called the cops -- well, cop. Bulges was a women's fitness center located just above the parking lot of the Thrifty-Mart, and from their treadmills and stair-climbing machines, the BULGES members could watch the ins and outs of the local market without feeling as if they were actively spying. So what had started as a moment of sheer glee and a mild adrenaline surge for the six of them who were watching as Lena chased Dale through the parking lot, turned quickly to shock as the evil developer thwacked the Latin Santa-ette in the breadbasket with a satchel of minicubes. Five of the six merely missed a step or gasped, but Georgia Bauman -- who had her treadmill cranked up to eight miles per hour at that very moment, because she was trying to lose fifteen pounds by Christmas and fit into a red-sequined sheath cocktail dress her husband had bought for her in a fit of sexual idealism -- bowled backward off her treadmill and landed in a colorful spandex tangle of yoga students who had been practicing on the mats behind her. "Ow, my ass chakra!" "That's you're root chakra." "Feels like my ass." "Did you see that? He nearly knocked her off her feet. Poor thing." "Should we see if she's all right?" "Someone should call Theo." The exercisers opened their cell phones in unison, like the Jets flicking switchblades as they gaily danced into a West Side Story gang-fight to the death. The Stupidest Angel A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, Version 2.0 . Copyright © by Christopher Moore. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
