Book review: “You Suck: A Love Story” by Christopher Moore

It’s a few days before Christmas in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, and Chet is a long-haired obese cat.

How obese?  Well, his human, a homeless guy “dirty beyond age or race, sort of grimy to the point of shine,” sits on the sidewalk against the wall of a bank with a hand-lettered sign: I AM POOR AND MY CAT IS HUGE. He’s 35 pounds, the cat. In You Suck: A Love Story, Christopher Moore doesn’t say how much the homeless guy, whose name turns out to be William, weighs.  It’s a minor failing.

Tommy and Jody want to borrow the cat, so, for $132.37, all that Tommy has in his pockets, William agrees to loan the cat — “His name is Chet” — to them for the night.

Back at their apartment, the two aren’t sure how to proceed.  Holding Chet, Tommy notices that the cat has a “healthy red life aura” and hears “his little kitty heart pounding.” Then:

There was a crackling noise inside of his head, like someone was popping bubble wrap in his ear canal, and then there was pressure on the roof of his mouth, painful pressure, and more crackling.  He felt something give and two sharp points poking his lower lip.  He pushed back from the cat and grinned at Jody, who yelped and jumped back.

“Fangth,” Tommy said.

“Yes, I can see that,” Jody said.

 

The thing is…

Here’s the thing: Tommy and Jody are vampires.

Back in September, Jody, a 26-year-old insurance company employee, was turned by an old — 800-year-old — vampire named Elijah who was bored. As she discovered to her surprise and pain, she could not be out in daylight in any way, shape or form without getting really, really scorched. Also, come sunrise, she went unconscious and stayed that way until sunset.

So, needing a minion — a non-vampire who could do stuff for her during the day and make sure no sunlight got near her — she hooked up with Tommy Flood, a doofus/would-be writer from Indiana in his late teens.

The term “hooked up” is used advisedly. Tommy agreed to move in with Jody and be her daytime go-fer and guardian, and, in return, the two had hot, delicious sex all through the nights.  Well, not all through the nights.  Part of the time, they had to go out and get stuff done.

Jody was extraordinarily glad to discover that, even in her vampire state, she could enjoy sexual delights, especially with her heighted vampire senses. It was one of the many things that books about vampires got wrong, she and Tommy came to find out.

In addition, Jody was extraordinarily glad to discover that she could feed on Tommy — i.e., suck his blood — without dispatching him to deadness or, alternatively, to undeadness.  So, he was not only her go-fer, guardian and sex toy, but also her breakfast, lunch and supper.

 

Owner’s manual

It turned out that much of what Jody learned about her vampirism she had to figure out by trial and error. Hence, her frequent plaint that her new state of being undead didn’t come with an owner’s manual.

Eventually, Jody got to know a lot more, including how to turn a human into a vampire, by getting up close and personal with Elijah.

That was the story in Moore’s 1995 novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story which his readers liked so much that they requested, demanded, entreated, pleaded for a sequel.  Hence, You Suck: A Love Story, published in 2007.  (It would be followed in 2010 by Bite Me: A Love Story.)

 

“You suck!”

You Suck starts just moments after the final page of Bloodsucking Fiends.  On that last page, Jody tells Tommy to come here, and, on the first page of the second book, Tommy wakes up a vampire….and is not especially pleased.  It’s kinda cute.

“You bitch, you killed me! You suck!”

“I wanted us to be together.” Jody: pale, pretty, long red hair hanging in her face, cute swoop of a nose in search of a lost spray of freckles, a big lipstick-smeared grin. She’d only been undead herself for a couple of months, and was still learning to be spooky.

The chapter is titled: “Get Over It, a Lot of People Are Dead.”

 

“Big-eyed protohuman”

So, here they are at the start of You Suck in something of a quandary.  Because Tommy is now undead, he has the same sunlight problem as Jody, and they both need blood on a regular basis.  Hence, Chet.

Tommy, although a newbie, is hungry himself for blood, the only food a vampire can consume, and it seems just the act of holding a warm blood source in his hands leads, by instinct, to his fangs popping out. And then….

Tommy turned back, braced the cat, who seemed much less freaked by this process than the two vampires in the room, and bit.

“Thuppt, thuppt, ack!” Tommy stood up and started brushing at his tongue to remove cat hair. “Yuck!”

Which is what leads Jody and Tommy to shave Chet during which they “discovered the value of duct tape [over the feet] as a grooming tool.” Which is why Chet ends up looking “like a big-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots — the feline love child of Golem and Doddy the house elf.”

(By the way, we’re only at page 24 at this point in a 328-page book.)

Chet is unharmed by all of this attention if a bit freaked out. William, though, finds it all rather creepy.

Which is why he changes his sign to: I AM HOMELESS AND SOMEONE SHAVED BY HUGE CAT.

 

Abby Normal

If you’ve read this far, I’m figuring you aren’t freaked out about cute vampire lovers or fat cats as a food source or sex between a human and an undead or between two of the undead.

And, if you’ve read this far, You Suck is for you.

The rest of the three hundred or so pages of the novel have to do with Tommy and Jody finding a new minion, keeping out of the way of two long-suffering cops , eluding Elijah who has found a way to reappear on the scene and dealing with the existential dilemma of whether it’s better to be a live human or an undead, as it were.

The minion they rope in — or who, in her goofy, perky, precocious 16-year-old way, ropes herself into their circle — is Abby Normal, a bright Gothish ray of sunshine (to her deep shame) who, in her diary, describes herself as Dedicated Servant of the Vampyre Flood.

 

“Go, Fighting Beatniks!”

Much of the novel is told through Abby’s diary in which she explains that her “day-slave name” is Allison Green.  It begins:

I have been to the lair of the vampire Flood.  I am part of the coven! Kinda. 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 Allen 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.

That about says it all. (Except for a lot of action and a bunch of other new vampires and a blue-skinned prostitute named — surprise! — Blue, and a geeky Korean science nerd named Steve who wants to help Jody and Tommy and joyfully becomes the boyfriend of Abby, nee Allison, who calls him Foo Dog.)

If you’re read this far, as I said above, You Suck is for you.

Oh, I forgot to mention that there is a 29-word chapter early on that has to do with poop and vampires.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.23.25

By the way, I also reviewed this book back in 2017.