And now for something completely different.

There's almost something guilty about my enjoyment of it, but I can't help it: I've grown to love myself a good Christopher Moore book, and, being no exception, The Stupidest Angel was an easy fast and amusing read. It goes by so quickly sometimes that I'm left with the blurry sense of fluff, but there are always these wonderful gems of insight or clever but accurate turns of description that I just revel in reading. It's like fluff for the societally conscious (though I feel somewhat pretentious even typing that).

I mean, come on, it's a Christmas story with zombies people. Zombies and an angel and a retired B movie actress whose dementia doesn't always allow her to separate herself from the barbarian heroine she played in her movies...an ex-pot-smoking sheriff and a little boy who gets sent to his room for describing Manischwitz blackberry (also the first wine I was ever allowed to taste) as a "'tannacious little cunt of a red, but not without a certain buttery geranium charm.'" And of course there's always the small side pieces regarding the animals, the fruit-bat wearing the Ray-Bans because he no like the light, and the dog who's very disturbed by the bat because he looks a little like a dog, but where was his butt? "How could he say hello if he couldn't sniff its butt?"

Anyway, the brief brief synopsis is that a little boy sees Santa murdered just before Christmas, and makes a wish for Santa to be brought back from the dead. And Raziel, the angel, it's his turn to grant some little boy's Christmas wish...

I love that Christopher Moore manages to bring the absolute fantastic into his stories without ever bringing with it the thought that he is writing sf (though of course he is). For some unknown reason this greatly pleases me. Perhaps it's the subversiveness of all these clean mainstream readers being unknowingly sullied by something they might otherwise have looked down upon... See the bad things genre brings us?*

I have never read either Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove or Practical Demonkeeping, which I think will have to be my next book purchases. They're just such fantastic titles, you know?

 

*For the record I am cautiously pro-genre labels for what I think of as their proper purpose, bringing together in one section the types of books for which a browser is probably searching. It frustrates me no end that the local BAM does not have a folklore or mythology section, that instead it is all somewhere in "Fiction." However I do not think we should let genre-labels stop us from exploring other genres, or fool us into thinking genre-labels are anything more than an admittedly sound marketing tool.