As it turned out, this is Christopher Moore’s debut novel, setting the stage for his other novels. It’s a magnificent novel, by turns hilarious, terrifying, heartwarming, and outrageous. Like his The Stupidest Angel Version 2.0, I had real trouble putting it down to eat, sleep, and get on with things.
It’s very clear from this novel and his others that Mr. Moore has a genuine fondness for his characters. He presents them just as they are, with all their flaws and virtues evident to the reader, in ways that make it hard not to believe that somewhere in the world there is a real town on the coast of California named Pine Cove, where these characters live their lives or come to visit, interacting in ways that range from horrible to normal to fantastic. Weird as some of those characters are — Catch, the demon, who has a central place in Practical Demonkeeping, is a perfect template for ‘weird’ — they have an undeniable aura of authenticity, the sort of thing that has you looking over your shoulder at the supermarket to make sure that one of them isn’t sneaking up on you. Most of Moore’s characters, however, are likeable, even the stinkers among them, if only for the very human troubles they get themselves into and their very human reactions to those troubles. We might all be Pine Covers, suggest these novels; there, but for the Grace of God, go most of us. (But wouldn’t it be fun to visit!)
Practical Demonkeeping opens on a scene that shows what happens when a complete loser, The Breeze, a former-surfer-turned-small-time-crook-and-drug-dealer, unexpectedly meets the supernatural in the form of Catch, a demon created to serve and destroy, who happens to be raveously hungry at the time. The Breeze is riding in the shotgun seat of Billy Winston’s Pinto wagon, and Billy is driving. Billy, who volunteers to chauffeur The Breeze around so he can tag along and get into the wild parties that The Breeze attends every night, is about to be summarily ejected from the orbit of The Breeze — but the upside is that, unlike The Breeze, he’ll still be there in the morning. For after casting Billy off like a discarded old boot, The Breeze not only fails to score with the ladies at the party, but fails to score sales on the pot he’s got for sale, and ends up out on the street, contemplating either walking or hitching the 40 miles back to Pine Cove, where he has digs in a trailer that has seen far better days. As he stands there in the cold of the night, two men in an old Chevy pull up twenty yards behind him. His first thought is that it’s a plainclothes police car. But when it turns out to be two civilians, his anger at the game they seem to be playing with his head makes him turn and head toward the Chevy, blood in his eye. And then the dwarf in the passenger seat opens the door on his side and gets out. Only, the dwarf isn’t a dwarf. And moments later, The Breeze has a brand-new home: the inside of Catch’s capacious belly . . .
Catch is in the company of 100-year old ex-seminarian Travis O’Hearn, who would really like to get rid of Catch, if he could only find the proper invocation for doing so. Catch looks on Pine Cove as an enticing smorgasboard; Travis thinks Pine Cove offers a way of ridding himself of Catch for good. The winos, neo-Pagans, deadbeat Casanovas, Old School landowners and shopkeepers, and ordinary citizens of Pine Cove, many of them holding dark, terrible secrets of their own, have other ideas.
The heart and soul of the town include such memorable characters and Howard Phillips, who believes that in the past Earth has been inhabited by superhumanly powerful entities who will soon return to reclaim their peropty, and whose old-fashioned courtesy and manners would be a welcome change from the more disreputable citizens of Pine Cove were it not that at times they tend to border on the nearly incomprehensible; Mavis, the formidable post-menopausal manager of The Head of the Slug, a local saloon, who has never met a man she has’t spent some time wishing she could spend some time under him; Augustus Brine, owner and proprietor of the local general store, whose surprising courage and steadfastness under fire end up saving the day for all of Pine Cove as well as Travis O’Hearn; and countless more memorable characters.
Practical Demonkeeping sneaks up on you. Its surprising twists and turns put Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to shame. One of those books that leave you looking around for more at the finish, it’s worth getting for your own personal library, because you’ll want to read and re-read it many times over.
- Goodreads rating – 3.83
- REVIEW – Yael