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Summary
Summary
The town psychiatrist has decided to switch everybody in Pine Cove, California, from their normal antidepressants to placebos, so naturally--well, to be accurate, artificially--business is booming at the local blues bar. Trouble is, those lonely slide-guitar notes have also attracted a colossal sea beast named Steve with, shall we say, a thing for explosive oil tanker trucks. Suddenly, morose Pine Cove turns libidinous and is hit by a mysterious crime wave, and a beleaguered constable has to fight off his own gonzo appetites to find out what's wrong and what, if anything, to do about it.
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 (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With in-your-face, South Park-worthy humor that only once slips into the truly offensive, Moore (Island of the Sequined Love Nun) has written the definitive Prozac allegory. Like its Puff-the-Libidinous-Dragon protagonist Steve, this novel delightfully runs roughshod over trailer parks, scrip-happy psychiatrists, right-wing moralists and "nuked-out future movie" stars with laugh-aloud wit and gentle affection. Pine Cove is a Pacific coast town of 5000Äa third of whom Dr. Valerie Riordan has rendered dependent on antidepressants. When obsessive-compulsive Bess Leander is found hanged from a calico cloth rope, a possible suicide, Val fears she has been overmedicating, and she blackmails fish-fetishist pharmacist Winston Krauss into giving all antidepressant users placebos instead. As the antidepressants wear off, a hilariously uncontrollable erotic revolution takes place in the formerly groggy and dispirited population. A simultaneous nuclear plant leak into the ocean awakens serotonin-deficit sea beast Steve, who descends on the town, disguised occasionally as a double-wide mobile home. When the doper constable and the methamphetamine-peddling sheriff duke it out, creating chaos instead of restoring order, we learn our lesson about better living through pharmaceuticals. Moore is Daniel Pinkwater for grownups, but a lot funnier; and his irreverent antics reveal a buoyant wit and surreal authority even while rendering the emotional range, sex life, and murderous tendencies of a sea monster. Agent: Nick Ellison. Author tour. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Godzilla comes to Pine Cove, nestled somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in Moore's latest foray into the zany and the zonked. If Steve Martin ever wrote a novel, it might be something like Moore's farcical labors in the field of psychotropic fiction. Here, one knows from the start that not only is nothing sacred to the author but also that nothing is important, and by mid-novel you're doubtful that anything life-changing will come of this bemused cartooning. Even so, Moore's latest is marginally less sick and more serious than 1997's Island of the Sequined Love Nun. It's September in Pine Cove. Cleaning freak Bess Leander has just hung herself. Investigating is stoned constable Theophilus Crowe. Meanwhile, Bess's therapist, Valerie Riordan, who counsels a large number of the town's population and keeps them tranquilized on a variety of psychotropics, gets scared by the statistic that 15 percent of all depressed people commit suicide. This means that perhaps more than 200 of her patients are slated for self-exit, despite her widely dispensed pills'for which she gets a kickback from the local druggist, a dolphin fetishist. When her qualms overcome her, Val instructs the druggist to replace the pills with placebos. As autumn leaves fall, her patients go into withdrawal and self-medicate, en masse, with alcohol. What's more, elderly Delta guitarist Catfish Jefferson has just been hired to play at the Head of the Slug Saloon, where his marvelously sad blues add to the local scene's seductive narcosis. Fifty years ago down on the Delta, Catfish first met the Sea Beast, a hundred-foot creature that loved his steel guitar and that has now risen from the depths, awakened by a sexy nuclear radiation leak, to blister the countryside with radiant energies of lust . . . . Patches of good writing break through the looniness and give hope for better things from Moore when his hare-brained imagination settles down. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
Suppose that depression serves an evolutionary purpose, such as assuring that some prey will be too down to run from predators. Suppose an amphibious beast lurks in the Pacific and, recalling the tangy radioactive dressing in that submarine full of Russian sailors it found, follows a nuclear leak to a little California coastal town. Suppose that, because of a new patient's apparent suicide, the town shrink switches all her depressive patients from Zoloft to placebos. Suppose, too, that the sea beast attracts prey with pheromones. Now, remember that patients taken off antidepressants experience a libidinal surge, and what do you have? A lot of horny people about to be lunch for a big lizard, that's what. Such is the complex of premises animating Moore's clownish take on Godzilla that, before it gets a little saggy during the last hundred pages, is thoroughly, delightfully silly, like nothing so much as the old (1950s) Mad magazine parodies of popular movies and TV shows, but with a lot more sex jokes. --Ray Olson
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove Chapter One As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good: lavender, sage, and a hint of clove. There were seven Shaker chairs hung on pegs on the walls of the Leanders' dining room. The eighth was overturned under Bess, who hung from the peg by a calico cloth rope around her neck. Dried flowers, baskets of various shapes and sizes, and bundles of dried herbs hung from the open ceiling beams. Theophilus Crowe knew he should be doing cop stuff, but he just stood there with two emergency medical technicians from the Pine Cove Fire Department, staring up at Bess as if they were inspecting the newly installed angel on a Christmas tree. Theo thought the pastel blue of Bess's skin went nicely with her cornflower-blue dress and the patterns of the English china displayed on simple wooden shelves at the end of the room. It was 7 A.m. and Theo, as usual, was a little stoned. Theo could hear sobs coming from upstairs, where Joseph Leander held his two daughters, who were still in their nightgowns. There was no evidence of a masculine presence anywhere in the house. It was Country Cute: bare pine floors and bent willow baskets, flowers and rag dolls and herb-flavored vinegars in blown-glass bottles; Shaker antiques, copper kettles, embroidery samplers, spinning wheels, lace doilies, and porcelain placards with prayers from the Dutch. Not a sports page or remote control in sight. Not a thing out of place or a speck of dust anywhere. Joseph Leander must have walked very light to live in this house without leaving tracks. A man less sensitive than Theo might have called him whipped. "That guy's whipped," one of the EMTs said. His name was Vance McNally. He was fifty-one, short and muscular, and wore his hair slicked back with oil, just as he had in high school. Occasionally, in his capacity as an EMT, he saved lives, which was his rationalization for being a dolt the rest of the time. "He just found his wife hanging in the dining room, Vance," Theo pronounced over the heads of the EMTs. He was six-foot-six, and even in his flannel shirt and sneakers he could loom large when he needed to assert some authority. "She looks like Raggedy Ann," said Mike, the other EMT, who was in his early twenties and excited to be on his first suicide call. "I heard she was Amish," Vance said. "She's not Amish," Theo said. "I didn't say she was Amish, I just said I heard that. I figured she wasn't Amish when I saw the blender in the kitchen. Amish don't believe in blenders, do they?" "Mennonite," Mike said with as much authority as his junior status would afford. "What's a Mennonite?" Vance asked. "Amish with blenders." "She wasn't Amish," Theo said. "She looks Amish," Vance said. "Well, her husband's not Amish," Mike said. "How can you tell?" Vance said. "He has a beard." "Zipper on his jacket," Mike said. "Amish don't have zippers." Vance shook his head. "Mixed marriages. They never work." "She wasn't Amish!" Theo shouted. "Think what you want, Theo, there's a butter chum in the living room. I think that says it all." Mike rubbed at a mark on the wall beneath Bess's feet where her black buckled shoes had scraped as she convulsed. "Don't touch anything," Theo said. "Why? She can't yell at us, she's dead. We wiped our feet on the way in," Vance said. Mike stepped away from the wall. "Maybe she couldn't stand anything touching her floors. Hanging was the only way." Not to be outdone by the detective work of his protege Vance said, "You know, the sphincters usually open up on a hanging victim-leave an awful mess. I'm wondering if she actually hanged herself." "Shouldn't we call the police?" Mike said. "I am the police," Theo said. He was Pine Cove's only constable, duly elected eight years ago and reelected every other year thereafter. "No, I mean the real police," Mike said. "I'll radio the sheriff," Theo said. "I don't think there's anything you can do here, guys. Would you mind calling Pastor Williams from the Presbyterian church to come over? I need to talk to Joseph and I need someone to stay with the girls." "They were Presbyterians?" Vance seemed shocked. He had really put his heart into the Amish theory. "Please call," Theo said. He left the EMTs and went out through the kitchen to his Volvo, where he switched the radio over to the frequency used by the San Junipero Sheriff's Department, then sat there staring at the mike. He was going to catch hell from Sheriff Burton for this. "North Coast is yours, Theo. All yours," the sheriff had said. My deputies will pick up suspects, answer robbery calls, and let the Highway Patrol investigate traffic accidents on Highway 1, that's it. Otherwise, you keep them out of Pine Cove and your little secret stays secret." Theo was forty-one years old and he still felt as if he was hiding from the junior high vice principal, laying low. Things like this weren't supposed to happen in Pine Cove. Nothing happened in Pine Cove. He took a quick hit from his Sneaky Pete smokeless pot pipe before keying the mike and calling in the deputies. Joseph Leander sat on the edge of the bed. He'd changed out of his pajamas into a blue business suit, but his thinning hair was still sticking out in sleep horns on the side. He was thirty-five, sandy-haired, thin but working on a paunch that strained the buttons of his vest. Theo sat across from him on a chair, holding a notepad. They could hear the sheriff's deputies moving around downstairs. The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove . Copyright © by Christopher Moore. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Lust Lizards of Melancholy Cove Low Price 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.
