Book review: “Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore

It’s a night a couple weeks before Christmas, and Jody is at the shops around Union Square in downtown San Francisco where, writes Christopher Moore, droves of “package-laden shoppers trudged through the aisles like the chorus line of the cheerful, sleigh-bell version of the Bataan Death March.”

She’s just had a fight with her boyfriend Tommy Flood who goes by the penname C. Thomas Floor — or would if he’d ever had anything published or if he’d ever written anything.  He’s living the starving-writer life but doing without the writing or the starving.

He’s an 18-year-old doofus from Indiana.  She’s 26 and “pretty in a way that made men want to tuck her into flannel sheets and kiss her on the forehead before leaving the room; cute but not beautiful.”

The two of them are typical Christopher Moore characters, beta specimens of their genders, the antithesis of the hard-driving, ambition-fueled alpha heroes of life, never on top of anything but instead on the side of things, never in control but always trying to ride the waves in a flotsam sort of way.

Their May-July relationship, which has blossomed into love — hence, the fight they’ve just had — was originally one of utility.  He ran errands for her during the day, and she provided the money for their apartment and the expertise for their healthy sex life.

Now, as a respite from the emotions of their fight, Jody has come to these shops as, for similar reasons, she often has in the past.  But there’s one thing different this time:

Christmas is better as a vampire, she thought.

 

“Heightened sensual world”

Moore’s 1995 novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is, as the title suggests, the love story of Judy and Tommy, but, of the two, only Jody is a bloodsucking fiend.

That’s why, with her super-sharp vampire senses, she so much enjoys Christmas this year at the Union Square stores:

Jody watched the heat trails of the lights, breathed deep the aroma of fudge and candy and a thousand mingled colognes and deodorants, listened to the whir of the motors that animated electric elves and reindeer under the cloak of Muzak-mellowed Christmas carols — and she liked it….

The crowds used to bother her, but now they seemed like…like cattle, harmless and unaware.  To her predator side, even the women wearing fur, who used to grate on her nerves, seemed not only harmless but even enlightened in this heightened sensual world.

 

“The loneliness”

One night, three months earlier, Jody was leaving her boring insurance job in the Transamerica Pyramid when she was attacked:

The smell of rotten meat filled her nostrils and she gagged even while trying to scream.  Her attacker spun her around and yanked on her hair, pulling her head back until she thought her neck would snap.  Then she felt a sharp pain on the side of her throat and the strength to fight seemed to evaporate.

That attacker is the other bloodsucking fiend of Moore’s story, eventually revealed to be Elijah Ben Sapir who stood five feet ten inches tall and had been a vampire for eight hundred years.  In his earlier life as a human, Ben Sapir was an alchemist, searching for the secret of life everlasting which he found at the end of someone’s teeth.

Granted, it came with the side effects of drinking human blood and staying out of sunlight, but he had gotten used to that.  It was the loneliness that he couldn’t abide.  Perhaps, after all these years, it would end.

That hope was based on Jody, a fledgling who had survived much longer than a long list of others over the past century.  Since turning her in September, Ben Sapir has been toying with her and Tommy while also getting his blood supply from a succession of luckless victims. (They were doubly luckless inasmuch as Ben Sapir found them and  they were already suffering fatal conditions.)

 

Killing and not killing for blood

He’s left their bloodless bodies for the police to find in order to cause Jody and Tommy trouble, even though he could have sucked his victims dry in a way that would have turned their bodies to dust.

Also, it must be noted that sucking blood from a human doesn’t have to kill the person, witness Jody’s regular feeding on Tommy — and his liking it!  As he indicated after their first frenetic lovemaking:

Tommy’s eyes were wide.  “You really are a vampire, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry.  I needed help.  I needed someone.”

“You really are a vampire.” It was a statement this time.

“Yes, Tommy, I am.”

He paused for a second to think, then said, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.  Let’s do it with our shoes off.”

 

No spines tingled

Unlike most people who write about vampires, Moore isn’t looking to scare the reader or tingle any spines.

Instead, here, as in his other books, he starts with a simple what-if — What if a vampire showed up in modern San Francisco?  How silly could that be?

The answer is very silly.  And very giddy.  And a lot of fun.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

1.30.25

 

NOTE: I wrote a review of this book back in 2017 when I first read it. To see it, click here.