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Wordplay – You Suck: A Love Story
San Fran bloodsuckers in love
By Clarke Reader
creader3@mscd.edu

You Suck: A Love Story By Christopher Moore $21.95

The title of Christopher Moore’s latest foray into horror and humor is more than enough to make you stop dead in your tracks and take a closer look.

You Suck: A Love Story is a brilliant combination of vivid characters, witty dialogue and some genuinely moving moments.

Despite the title, the novel is not a relationship tome for couples stuck in a rut. It is about young love, but the lovers of the story are vampires in San Francisco.

Thomas C. Flood has just been killed and turned into a vampire by his girlfriend Jody, herself a vampire for only a couple of months. She did not do it because she is evil or angry, but rather because she was lonely and wanted to share her world with Tommy.

As would be expected, Tommy thinks loneliness is not the best reason to kill someone and turn them into a creature of the night, but that’s the price of love.

Now the 19-year-old Tommy must not only navigate the dangers of being in a relationship, but he has to do it while figuring out how to drink blood, use his new vampire powers and cope with the fact that he is forever sundered from the world and people he knew.

Since he is 19, his hormones control his actions more than his brain, and a good amount of comedy stems from his immature course of action.

There’s a host of bizarre characters in the story, from the Emperor of San Francisco (a homeless man who wanders the city with his army of dogs) to Blue, a Las Vegas prostitute who dyes her entire body blue, capitalizing on the popularity of the Blue Man Group.

The standout by far, however, is Abby Normal, a young goth girl who wants nothing more than to be a creature of the night like Tommy and Jody, and who becomes their willing “minion.” The character’s innate cynicism and wit is a high point of the prose.

San Francisco plays a crucial role in the story with its various landmarks and seamy underbelly bringing out different aspects of the characters.

You Suck is a sequel to Moore’s third novel, Bloodsucking Fiends, and overlaps with his most recent book, A Dirty Job. To get a full sense of the story, both should probably be read first.

Moore’s novels seamlessly fuse the unusual and the menial, and he exhibits a rare skill in making fantastical events plausible. To Moore, it all makes sense.

The dialogue is brimming with humor, sometimes subtle, sometimes flagrant and usually snide. What’s more, the cultural references dropped left and right make for some biting social commentary.

For fans of the horror genre, comedy or a weird blending of the two, You Suck does the exact opposite of what its title says.