A Genius In Flip-Flops: An Interview With Christopher Moore

You've also done a lot of writing about religion in a time when all of them seem to have gone a little bit nuts. Can people not take a joke anymore?

I think that it's obvious that people need to lighten up about their religions. You asked me before if Buddhism brought me anything, perhaps it's a realization that faith does not necessarily have to be dire and dour - those aspects of religion that make it seem were imposed on it by men trying to control populations. One of the things I tried to do in Lamb was show that at the heart of every faith is the precept that we all share a divine spark, a holy ghost, a god within, and if we recognize that as what unites us in humanity, it's more difficult to draw these phenomenally stupid lines in the sand over cartoons, or music, or evolution, or women's rights. Either you believe that God is infinite, or you do not. The trouble comes when men try to put their god in a box. It is always an act of arrogance, of petty egoism, to do so.

What was it like moving on to a new self-contained story after doing The Stupidest Angel, which was a real love letter to the fans of your earlier books?

Actually, it was fun to work with characters and a setting I had used before, and a challenge to bring in characters from settings that were so far from the original books. I had to bring characters from Micronesia, and the Holy Land two-thousand years ago and get them all to this little village in Northern California at Christmastime to be attacked by zombies. It was hard, again because of deadlines, but overall it was a surprisingly satisfying book.

You've dropped a few "Easter Eggs" for fans into your books. Are there any in A Dirty Job?

There are a bunch of characters from previous books that walk through A Dirty Job. Some are named, some not. As always, I tried to make it so you wouldn't lose anything by not having read the previous books - the story certainly stands on its own, and the lead characters are all unique to it, but I think that fans of my other books will have some fun moments when they see the repeat characters.

Speaking of your "Peeps," you've had a longtime community of fans with whom you spend a lot of time interacting. What do your get out of that feedback?

A lot of reinforcement, as well as a sense of what my readers are like. I think a lot about my readers when I'm reading. All art is about communication, and knowing your audience is key to that, I think. I also have a lot of fun, too. People who gravitate toward my work tend to have great senses of humor and be pretty smart, so there's more take on my part than give. My peeps crack me up a lot, and there's a lot of value in that.

You're enormously gracious to your fans. What's the weirdest thing you've seen at a book signing?

Five or six women with oven mitts taped to their hands, who wanted me to autograph the mitts. There's a character in The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove who has become so compulsive about self-gratification that she has to tape oven mitts to her hands to keep from touching herself. When I saw those women standing in the signing line I totally cracked up.

You got a big boost when you were picked for The Today Show's book club for Fluke. Did things change for you in any kind of Oprah-esque fashion?

Not in the least. I flew from Hawaii to New York, went on the show for six minutes, and was back in flip-flops working on my book twenty-four hours later. It was very generous of Nicholas Sparks to pick me for the club, and I'm sure that we sold a lot more books because of it, but it didn't have anything near an Oprah effect. My friends yelled at me for wearing a tie on the air, when normally I wear aloha shirts at public appearances. I got razzed; that was my "Oprah" effect.

There are some horror elements to many of your books - Catch the Demon, who shows up regularly, the zombies in The Stupidest Angel, and of course the vampires of San Francisco in Bloodsucking Fiends - but you have enormous fun with the clichés. What appeals to you about creature features?

I don't know. I've been into them since I was a kid, a little kid. I collected all the Frankenstein, Mummy, Dracula toys from the old movies, I watched the chiller features on Saturdays, went to all the horror movies when I was little by myself - I went to see Psycho by myself when I was six. I guess it imprinted on me.

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