Okay, remember how I said in my reviews of Coyote Blue and Island of the Sequined Love Nun that those books were not as laugh out loud funny and you could clearly see the development of Christopher Moore’s writing style? Well, I may have been a bit off. Having just finished Practical Demonkeeping, his first book during the reading of which I bellowed with laughter a great number of times, I’d say that, yes, his writing style has sharpened, but also the setting of Pine Cove (in Practical Demonkeeping as well as The Love Lizard of Melancholy Cove and The Stupidest Angel) is just fantastic. Of course, and I speak with no authority here, most writers tend to spend alot of time crafting that first book, much like music groups whose first album breaks chart records but their second, being that much less time was spent on it, can be good but does not sail quite as high.
Practical Demonkeeping is about a guy who has had a demon bound to him for the past seventy years. During which time he has tried very hard to keep it from wantonly eating people and destroying things. He’s also been searching for a way to send the demon back to where it came from and this is what brings him to Pine Cove. Hilarity ensues.
Now, having read all of Christopher Moore’s other books, I come to the most recent, the just released, A Dirty Job…
as I did with later books, but his writing style is definately coming together as more of the absurd creeps into this book than the last.