Moore, Christopher: Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story

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I confess I had never thought to wonder about the difficulties that might ensue were I to wake up of an...evening and find that I had been turned into a vampire. But the logistical problems alone are considerable. You can't keep your day job. And you'll need a minion to take care of certain errands for you, like going to the bank or hunting for a new apartment with a windowless bedroom. Meanwhile, your inhumanly acute senses are picking up the sound of gnats whirring around down the block, and you don't even know how to be undead. Can Anne Rice's word on matters vampirish be taken as gospel?

Twenty-six-year-old, red-headed Jody, the protagonist of Christopher Moore's romantic comedy Bloodsucking Fiends, finds herself in this predicament after being attacked one night on her way home from work. She wakes up under a dumpster with her left hand burnt to a crisp and perhaps a  hundred thousand dollars tucked inside her blouse. ("A man attacked me, choked me, bit my neck, burned my hand, then stuffed my shirt full of money and put a dumpster on me and now I can see heat and hear fog. I've won Satan's lottery.") But unlike most fledgling vampires, Jody adapts well to her new situation. She finds a minion right off the bat, a nineteen-year-old would-be writer who's just moved to San Francisco from Indiana. Tommy will do just about anything for Jody, short of eating bugs, and that includes tolerating--indeed bonding with--a dead guy in their freezer. Soon Jody's hanging from the ceiling of their shared bedroom, reading Kerouac aloud in a post-coital, vampiric display. She and Tommy have lucked into an improbable love connection, but their relationship is not without its problems: Jody's mother doesn't approve of Tommy, for one thing, and blood-drained corpses keep turning up in the neighborhood....

Bloodsucking Fiends abounds in clever dialogue and dark humor. Fans of Douglas Adams or Tom Robbins, and indeed of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at its campiest, will enjoy this fast-paced, fun read.