What Sucks Is That Y'all Have To Wait Until January To Read It

Despite the best of intentions, I had an incredibly unproductive weekend. I went down to my parents' beach house with two weeks worth of laundry and lots of schoolwork. I planned to get everything clean while grading papers and planning the next week's lessons.

What I didn't plan on was my friend Meaghan showing up to our Friday night dinner date with the advance copy of Chris Moore's next book, nor did I count on my complete inability to resist his charms after I decided to read the first couple pages just to see how it was -- my professional responsibility as a sometimes bookseller.

The book begins with Tommy's discovery that his vampire girlfriend Jody has turned him into a vampire while he was sleeping.

And really, I was just gonna read a few pages and then return to it at some point when I don't have a two-foot-high stack of papers to grade (you know, like maybe in June). But on page two there was this:

"Yeah, but you should have asked me before you did this, " Tommy said. "You shouldn't just kill a guy without asking. It's inconsiderate." Tommy was from Indiana, and his mother had raised him to have good manners and to be considerate of other people's feelings.

"You had sex with me while I was unconscious," Jody said.

"That's not the same," Tommy said. "I was just being friendly, like when you put a quarter in someone else's parking meter when they aren't there -- you know they appreciate it later, even if they don't thank you personally."

Come on. If your choices were that or a bunch of essays about whether or not New Orleans should be rebuilt, I bet you would have opted for the Chris Moore too, especially if you knew that the essay on the top of the stack made frequent reference to New Orleans as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

Chris Moore is laugh-out-loud funny, but BRAINY laugh-out-loud funny. All of his books (my favorite, of course, being Lamb) are both amusing and intelligent. The best part of You Suck is not the narrative (although it IS quite good) but the excerpts from the diary of the vampires' 16-year-old minion Abby Normal, a perky girl trying her damnedest to be a goth girl. So what if Moore stole her name from Young Frankenstein? Her diary is hilarious.

The Chronicles of Abby Normal
Dedicated Servant of the Vampyre Flood
I have been to the lair of the vampyre Flood. I am part of the coven! Okay, back up. So I like slept till eleven, because we're on Christmas break, only it's called winter break now because Jesus is AN OPPRESSIVE ZOMBIE BASTARD AND WE DO NOT BOW DOWN TO HIS BIRTHDAY! At least not at Alan Ginsberg High School, we don't. (Go, Fighting Beatniks!) But it's all good, 'cause I'm going to have to get used to getting up later if I'm going to be a creature of the night.

So, like first thing, I made some toast, and it burned, as black as my soul, and I was so bummed that my tears of despair fell like cold bits of crystal, to be destroyed on the unforgiving rocks of this miserable life. But then I saw that Mom had left a twenty on the counter with a note:

Allison (Allison is my day-slave name -- my mom named me after some song by some Elvis guy, so I totally refuse to accept it), here's your lunch money, and please stop at Walgreens and pick up some RID for Ronnie's head lice. (Veronica is my sister, who is twelve and a total tumor on the ass of my existence.)

So I was like, Sweet! Starbucks!

See? Funny. And don't worry, I haven't given away the best parts. Besides, the book doesn't even come out until January -- you'll have forgotten all about this by then. In the meantime, check out the Chris Moore oeuvre. You, too, can be part of his devoted cult following.