Bite Me: A Love Story review

Bite Me: A Love Story is the third book in Christopher Moore's 'Vampire' trilogy which chronicles the love life of a C. Thomas (Tommy) Flood and his vampire girlfriend Jody. Fear not as this isn't like those silly crapfest that has recently been turned into films. Instead it is filled with generous amount of action and dry humour that you would expect from the author of A Dirty Job and Lamb. If you've read all of Christopher Moore's books (and I have, about ten times each), Bite Me will sound oddly familiar. It gathers a couple of characters from previous books, blends them and churns them into one comedy mess, and when I mean mess, I mean a book you simply can't put down.

This is a love story, though not your typical one. Tommy and Jody are lovers, who so happened to be vampires, except they aren't the elder kind who sleeps in coffins and can turn into bats. Jody has only been a vampire a couple of months longer than Tommy, and Tommy has only been one for like a week. Biggest issue of all is Tommy wants out. And then there's them being bronzed into statues by their perky underage goth girl minion Abby Normal.

Abby, whose daywalker name is Allison Green, lives with her genius scientist undergrad boyfriend Steve. Steve, also known as Foo, has hair that is very manga (Abby's words, not mine) and perform experiments on vampire things, finding ways to turn them back though the fact that they can turn into mists irritates him more. There's also this fat shaved cat, Chet, who has somehow turned himself into a vampire and is stalking the city turning hobos into dusts with his gang of smaller but equally deadly minion of undead cats.

To make matter worse, the elder vampires has set sail for the city. Their mission: to clean up the mess left by Elijah, the original vampire who turn Jody (and Chet), and that is to kill all the vampire cats, vampire humans and anyone who has seen or knows about the vampires. Soon enough Tommy, Jody, emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay area Abby, Steve, the Emperor of San Francisco and his lieutenant dogs, the Animals aka Safeway night crew (with the help of a Chinese grandmother's anti vampire cat remedy) and two incompetent cops have to join forces to save the city, and more importantly, themselves.

I am gong to be honest here. Bite Me was kinda disappointing by Christopher Moore's standard. It is a far improvement over his previous book Fool (which I am pretending never happened), but falls behind his greats like the original vampire love book Bloodsucking Fiend, the missing gospel that became Lamb, and A Dirty Job (easily one of the greatest comedy book written). Abby, whose diary posts were pretty amusing in You Suck, came off as being a tad more annoying than usual. It doesn't help that her blog posts read like an older person trying to be young (which is exactly what it was). And then there's that other annoying character from Fluke, but I'll leave that as a surprise. Bloodsucking Fiend had just the right balance between humour, and isn't as over the top as this. The final quarter of this book also felt rushed. There are also plenty of unanswered questions and lose ends not tied up, like what is up with that old short Japanese man?

Still, any disappointing book by Christopher Moore is considered great in the literal world and I would not hesitate to recommend his to anyone who has a liking for books with plenty of humour. Just read Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck first if you can help it (you don't have to, as the first few chapters does good in catching you up). Personally I am still reeling at the unexpected ending, but perhaps a fourth book to fix that? Please...!

Bite Me: A Love Story is available as a hardcover from Amazon UK and Amazon.com