Journal Entry 1 by Kyrissaean from Littleton, New Hampshire USA on Thursday, February 28, 2008

Holy smokes, but this was a riot! I read Bloodsucking Fiends a couple years ago and thought it was kind of funny, but a bit too scattered to be a big deal. Everyone kept raving about Christopher Moore though, so I thought I'd give him another shot and tried this one as an audio. Loved it! Maybe Moore just works better out loud -- and this narrator reads as the main character perfectly -- or maybe this is just a much better book, but either way, this is highly recommended for anyone interested in a screwball comedy!

The description certainly doesn't sound all that great. I tried for months to get my mother to listen to this on her commute. "What's it about again?" she'd ask. "Well, there's this guy, and his wife dies right at the very beginning so he's taking care of their little baby alone, and all the pets keep dying, and it looks like maybe his this mystical Death persona...." Finally I just sort of tricked her into listening to it, and she loved it! She can't stop talking about how funny it was!

My favorite line is probably "Sophie, I thought we agreed not to use the 'Kitty' word." Chortle!



From Publishers Weekly
Moore spends a significant portion of his new novel speculating on the nature of the careful, cautious beta male, so it's appropriate that Stevens, reading the novel, sounds like one himself, gently picking his way through the blackly comic tangles of the book's dense plot. Charlie Asher's life is thrown into chaos when his beloved wife unexpectedly dies, and while trying to recover a sense of balance, he finds himself suddenly surrounded by the dead and dying. Stevens's voice is professional and assured, letting the jokes take care of themselves rather than pounding them into submission. Most importantly, Stevens's average-guy voice stands in for Charlie's own increasingly puzzled demeanor, besieged by a world which makes less and less sense, in which the realm of the dead grows ever larger.