Home for the Holidays with Christopher Moore
Dave Weich, Powells.com
All angels are not created equal. Raziel showed up ten years late for
the birth of Jesus, remember. This is not the first time he's underperformed.  In The
Stupidest Angel, God sends Raziel to cozy Pine Cove, California, to grant
the Christmas wish of a child. Someone should have told him that kids can't always
be trusted.
Maybe you're already one of the converted, awaiting each new installment in
the canon of Christopher
Moore with giddy anticipation. Or maybe you're about to discover one of
the funniest, uninhibited storytellers in America.
"The unhinged Hiaasen,"
Janet Maslin called him in the New York Times. "He's Daily Show-funny
and willing to subvert anything."
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"Christopher Moore's prose is hyper but never shticky, and his compassion for this island of misfits shines as bright as the samurai sword wielded by a schizophrenic warrior woman on a not-so-silent Christmas Eve. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly
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"One of the finest pieces of imagination since Anatole France's Penguin Island or George Orwell's Animal Farm." Denver Post
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"In inventing his own conflicted, determined Jesus ? one who found His conviction one step at a time instead of emerging from the manger fully formed and ready to preach ? Moore is endlessly, wryly creative." Tasha Robinson, The Onion
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Dave: You've brought back characters from earlier novels before, but
not in such abundance. What made you bring back so many for Christmas in Pine
Cove?
Christopher Moore: I knew the book was going to be brief compared to
a full novel it was planned as a Christmas book, it had to be shorter
and bringing back the characters meant I wouldn't have to do as much
work to establish them. They had a history, and they had some dimension. Also,
it was easier for me because I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. I knew these
people. And they already lived in Pine Cove.
The whole point of my Pine Cove books has been the interconnectedness of life
in a small town. Christmas is a perfect microcosm of a small town, a compression
of time.
Raziel the angel came back [from Lamb]
because I wanted to do the whole angel-Christmas-wish fulfillment thing, and
I wanted to screw it up. Raziel is not the brightest halo in the host.
The character from Island
of the Sequined Love Nun it doesn't matter that he was in that to
this book, but he was brought back by request. My readers kept writing and saying,
"Bring Roberto the fruit bat back." It's not that easy to write a chatty fruit
bat into any story, so I had to bring back Tucker Case, too, the pilot who belongs
to Roberto. That was basically Total Request Live. He's in the book because
my readers wanted him in the book.
Dave: There's a bit at the very beginning: "In another Christmas story,
Dale Pearson? might be visited in the night by a series of ghosts who? would
bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward
his fellowman. But this is not that kind of Christmas story." How would you
describe the stories that you write?
Moore: I don't know. I've sort of made a reputation by high-stepping
my way out of genre. As soon as somebody says, "He does this," I'm not standing
there anymore.
The only thing that matters to me about my stories is that they're entertaining
and they're funny. And I tend to get bored easily, so I generally throw something
supernatural in. I would say they're humorous novels that have a supernatural
bent, but that's as close as you're going to get to fitting them all in the
same basket.
Dave: In relation to television and movies, it seems like humor is
underrepresented in fiction. There's a demand for it, but there doesn't seem
to be the supply.
Moore: That's true. There aren't that many funny books out there. Why? I don't know.
Maybe it's hard. Or maybe it requires a certain skill, and the people with that
skill are working in television and movies.
Comedy eats up a lot of material pretty quickly, which is why you have a dozen
guys writing sitcoms by committee. The reason I'm writing funny books is that
I wish there were more. I'd go to the shelf and say, "Wait a minute. That's
not there."
I encourage my readers to write me with suggestions. I'll read it, and if
I like it I'll put it on my web site. I have a whole "Chris's picks: Books to
read while I'm finishing my next one (so you'll quit yelling at me)" page. The
reaction, not so much in numbers but in enthusiasm, of people who find my work
and refer to other funny authors Douglas
Adams, Tom
Robbins, Kurt
Vonnegut, and people like that they're over the moon about these
guys.
I wish I had an answer, and I wish that people who were looking for funny
books knew that mine were out there. There certainly is more of a demand than
there is a supply. Maybe doing this interview will fix that. Everybody will
go, "Oh, that's the new niche."
Dave: On your web site, you list jobs you held before becoming a writer:
a roofer, an insurance man, a DJ? What kind of music did you play?
Moore: Alternative rock and roll. This was in the late eighties. I
had a soft spot for those British singers that sounded like British singers, for example Richard Butler from The Psychedelic Furs. And guys like Robbie Robertson
and U2, album-oriented rock.
I worked at a non-programmed station. The goal was to get so obscure that
no one would know? You'd do an album cut from a bootleg recorded in some
guy's garage. It became so incestuous among the DJs that someone would eventually shake
us up and say, "No, we really need to play something somebody has heard before."
I tended to be really downbeat as a radio personality. I would do the Miserable
Monday show, but I would do it all week. I did a drive-time show but I preferred
that it was at night, so I had piped-in darkness.
All my music was pretty high energy, pretty upbeat. People would call in requests:
"My wife just left me. Would you play Neil Young 'Don't Let It Bring You Down'?"
And I'd say, "No, I'm not playing that whiny shit for you. I'll play 'Into the
Black'." I specialized in upbeat music presented in a very cynical way.
Dave: Your novels often revolve around the characters' occupations:
pilots, prophets, marine biologists? What have been the more enjoyable jobs
to research?
Moore: Certainly researching with the marine biologists was great.
I wrote that book [Fluke] so I'd be able to hang out with guys who poke whales with
sticks, to get in the water with humpback whales stuff that people will
let you do now that you have a pile of books.
They'll let you do absurd stuff. Tom
Clancy can blow up a whole country now that he's got this big pile of books.
Me, I get to hang out with marine biologists.
In the first three books, I used up all the occupations I had done personally.
I ran out of life to write about. When I started to write my fourth book, where
the main character is a pilot, I actually took some flying lessons. I hung out
around pilots to learn how they talked and what their priorities were.
If I'm going to ask people to believe all this wild crap like islanders worshipping
the ghost of a World War Two bomber pilot and talking fruit bats and all the
rest, then the real stuff has to resonate. It has to feel real. You pick up
salient details; that's what makes the book real. It's not the amount
that you heap on people; it's saying things like: pilots talk about a rough
landing as being when all the overheads pop open and everybody's gym bag falls
out. Well, that's how they really define a rough landing.
Definitely the marine biologists were the most fun to research. The
pilot thing was kind of fun. I learned to fly a helicopter enough to get myself
up in the air and crash, which it turns out is not that much in demand as a
skill. My father was in law enforcement, so whenever I have a cop I can fall
back on that.
I'll also just talk to people. I did a book about taking the whole village
of Pine Cove off their antidepressants at the same time [The
Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove]. A guy who used to go to the gym at the
same time as I did was a diagnostician at a nearby hospital, so he knew a lot
about psychotropic drugs. For forty-five minutes a day, I'd just grill him.
"So what happens when you take them off their drugs?"
I got that information from him just because I could. Now, more and more people
come to my events and offer. They think I'll never call them, but I do. I had
to learn how to steal a 747 for Island
of the Sequined Love Nun. An airline pilot had been emailing me for a couple
years, saying, "If you ever need to know anything about flying?" So I wrote
him. I said, "I need to know how to steal a 747." He said, "Do this, this, this,
and this, and you're good to go." That's exactly how I steal the 747 in the
book. It was much less sensitive in those days. I don't think they just email
that out now, but at the time it seemed harmless.
Dave: When you're planning a book and you have any number of ideas,
how much does the nature of the research impact your willingness to take on
a project? In Fluke,
it sounds like, it drove you to the subject.
Moore: In some, it's huge. With Fluke, it was the book:
I wanted to write a whale book because I wanted to learn about the animals and
the people who work with them.
With books like Lamb,
which is really my only historical novel, it's not about that. It's more of
a theme-driven concern. The research is just to give you whatever background
I can get from going to Israel and looking at piles of rocks, which is what
they have there. Also reading a lot of history and archeology, but that's a
different kind of book.
As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky
noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career
that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone.
Unless you pick projects that are going to get you out doing things, you're
not going to actually live your life. You're just going to write about life.
I can only go so long. This has been two years I've been sitting here thinking
about stuff that happened two thousand years ago. I need to go do something.
The whale book was a response to that.
I'd say at least half of the consideration for what I'm going to write about
is what I'm going to get to do to learn about either the setting or the people
that are in the book.
Dave: Part of your attraction to the story in Lamb
must have been the fact that no one had written about it before. A big, blank
canvas was staring you in the face.
Moore: Right. I had learned that from a PBS special called From Jesus to
Christ. I wasn't versed in the Bible more than most people First
Church of NFL was what I was brought up in but when it was pointed out
that nearly thirty years of Christ's life hadn't been written, I thought, Well,
I don't know anything about history or religion. I should write that.
Sometimes you've got to throw the gauntlet down and say, Can I pull this
off? I thought, How audacious would it be to not only write the missing
years but make it funny and credible? It was a big challenge, the hardest
thing I've ever tried to do.
Dave: Did you give yourself any particular guidelines to work with
the material? It's a fine line to walk.
Moore: I didn't want to make it an attack book. I wanted to tell the
story, make it funny and entertaining, but I didn't want to change anybody's
mind or attack their faith.
I made the assumption that the Four Gospels are true. Jesus is who the Four
Gospels say he is. It doesn't matter whether I believe that; that's how I defined
the character. But a whole bunch of stuff is not explained or doesn't make any
sense, so I thought, I'll make sense of that.
Even trying to make sense of those things is funny sometimes. Water into
wine? Well, he's hammered. That's why you make a beer run, right? You ran
out. You've been drinking.
I didn't have an evangelical agenda. I just wanted to bring out the humanity
of the story.
Dave: Once you had the idea to fill in the missing years, how did you
decide how to approach the material? You tell the story from the point of view
of Jesus' best friend, Biff.
Moore: The book was set off by a scene in The
Master and Margarita. The author, Bulgakov,
writes the trial of Jesus from the point of view of Pontius Pilate and
Pilate has a migraine when he's watching this event go on. It's a story we've
all heard a thousand times, but when I read that, I thought, This is so immediate.
There's this guy right here and I relate to him. I've had a headache and he
has a headache. All of a sudden it took on a reality that it had never had
for me before. That set off the idea. I thought, Maybe you could do the whole
story that way, with a witness, who feels real.
I want you to feel the dirt not in the literary way, use all five senses,
make it real, but yes, that. I found out: what kind of house did they live in,
what kind of floor did they have, what kind of day-to-day life did they lead?
And it's a great story. Imagine the responsibility of being the son of God.
Imagine the responsibility of being the best friend of the son of God.
Biff had to have a pretty resilient personality in his own right.
Dave: I came away from the book liking Jesus, or "Joshua" as you call him, quite a bit. I wasn't expecting that.
Moore: I just stuck to what he said and then made him human, which
was supposed to be the whole point. His sacrifice didn't mean anything if he
was a god. It only meant something if he was human; you had to make him human.
Once I became conversant with the Gospels, I thought, This is not the guy
I'm being presented by the Republican Party or the guys on TV. What he's saying
is not what they're saying.
I tried to be true to the spirit of his kindness and look at things logically.
Why would there be a New Testament? Because there needed to be. Because
the vengeful god of the Old Testament maybe got up one day and said, "Wow, I
really shouldn't behave that way. I've been kind of childish, smiting whole
populations just to get the land to put these guys in so I could smite them
next."
Then learning about the Jews' relationship with God, which is different from
what Christians perceive. It's a two-way street with Jews: He picked us, so
he has some responsibility.
It was important to me to present these kids as Jewish, because they were.
I was really concerned with this anti-Semitism that starts in the gospel of
John and ends up with millions of people being killed under the justification
of Christianity. I'm like, Hello? These people were all Jews. It was
important for the reader to sympathize with them.
But all that wouldn't have worked if it wasn't funny. We can talk about the
high-mindedness of the themes and the rest, but it's not accessible unless it's
funny.
Dave: Is there a subject that you've ducked or skirted, something you
might have written about but decided you didn't want to take on?
Moore: Politics, probably, more recently. I blog about it, but I don't
think I want to put it in a novel. It's not my milieu. I don't live there. I'm
not Chris
Buckley. I don't live in Washington, and those aren't the people I have
lunch with. I live on a Pacific Island.
And I don't want to preach to anybody. I always want to keep my eye on the
idea that no matter what my message might be, if it's not funny it's not effective.
If it's not entertaining, it's not effective.
Also, politics goes stale really quickly. My first book [Practical
Demonkeeping] has been out around twelve years now and it's still in print.
The technology in it? Now you can carry a cell phone around in your back pocket;
when I wrote that book they were the size of a suitcase. But politics goes stale
in months. By the time you get a book out, it's stale.
Dave: Soon after you published Practical Demonkeeping, Disney
bought the film rights. When you were writing it, did you see it that way, acting
out in front of you as the scenes evolved in your head?
Moore: I did. I do that a lot with the action scenes of my books. That
one is particularly fantastic and has some images I hadn't seen at the time.
A lot of times you see the scenes happen and you're just transcribing them,
particularly in the description. Then you rewind the tape because the characters
will dictate, That's not what I would say there or That's not funny.
Very often the action is the same. And it's hard to write action. It's harder
to write things that are moving than things that are standing still.
If you envision it, all you have to do is tell what you see, but if you try
to write action then it's as if you're holding strings you have
to move this guy's hand over here and that guy's hand over there. It's much
harder.
As comic timing becomes more and more important in my later books, you have
whole pages of nothing but dialogue. I have to see these people saying this
stuff to each other, but I have to imagine that you're seeing it, too. Hopefully,
I've set it up well enough so that I don't have to explain every gesture.
When I teach writing, I say that you have to write in scenes. That's what
drama is: scenes that accomplish something. You watch them and you put them
down. Sometimes you craft dialogue, but the visuals you're almost always watching
on that screen of your imagination and writing down what you see.
Dave: What's your fascination with the undead?
Moore: I don't know if it's a fascination. It's just a cool thing.
It's a cliché as much as anything.
In The Stupidest
Angel, I like the idea that the dead are actually listening to what's going
on in the cemetery. I wanted to write about that. People say some really stupid
stuff in the cemetery, and they don't think there's an audience. That was a
fun thing to do with the undead, to imagine that these people were just hanging
out. And it's the extension of the little town where every time someone says
something you find out across town, but in a different version. This is the
graveyard, and people remember for fifty years. That was the reason for it in
this book, to have the dead be part of the community.
If it makes you feel any better, my next book is about dead, not undead.
Dave: What's the scariest movie you've ever seen?
Moore: The Haunting. It probably had as much to do with who
I was at the time, but when I was a kid The Haunting with Julie Harris
scared the bejesus out of me. A few years ago, I think, they remade it with
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liam Neeson.
When I was even littler than that, about seven, I saw The Haunting of Hill
House and slept with the light on for months.
I'm trying to think of what scared me the most as an adult. What's scared
me the most in a visual medium was playing Resident Evil by myself in the basement
of my mom's house a few years ago. During a snowstorm. It scared the hell out
of me. You're wandering through dark halls, all the stuff you promised you'd
never do.
Dave: What are you reading these days?
Moore: As we talked about earlier, those genres that I'm on the edge
of, funny horror in some instances, I read less of than I used to, but
I'm always reading something. I like imaginative fiction, I really do. I don't
think I have the patience for literary fiction because stuff doesn't really
happen.
I like Neal
Stephenson, William
Gibson, pyrotechnic writers. I've been reading a guy named China
Mieville, who has this Hieronymus Bosch-like imagination. It's interesting
to read his books because there's no paradigm for them. You're just going, Ugh.
I'm so glad this stuff's in his head.
I'm always looking for funny books and being serially disappointed. There
are just those few authors, consistently, who give you your money's worth: Elmore
Leonard, Carl
Hiaason, guys like that. Some of the most entertaining writers in America
right now are crime writers.
Dave: Do you have any odd superstitions?
Moore: No, other than I make them up as I go along.
Well, one of my superstitions and this was foisted upon me by another
author is that any book that is dedicated to a woman, by the time it
comes out the woman will be gone. My wife-like girlfriend of ten years and I
both believe this. People are always dogging her, "Why doesn't he dedicate a
book to you?" And she's like, "No!" Then the relationship is over. We've seen
it with writer friends so often.
I've tried to develop all kinds of weird idiosyncrasies around my writing.
As you get to where you're making a living at it, you think, I can be more
and more eccentric, but as it turns out if you're going to make a living
at it you can't indulge too many of those habits. The book's now due. I really
need to get at the manuscript. I have some superstitions, but most of them
I'll cast aside for pragmatic purposes.
Christopher Moore visited the Powells.com compound on December 7, 2004. It rained
steadily throughout his stay. By the time we finished talking and Chris returned
to his van, its windows were fogged with the breath of the undead. ("Leave some
windows down a crack next time," they griped as if he'd fall for that.)
Later that evening, the author read to giggly fans downtown at Powell's City
of Books.
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