Jody was attacked by a man who bit her neck and left her for dead in an alleyway. She woke up a vampire. What is she going to do now?

“(Jody) was twenty-six and pretty in a way that made men want to tuck her into flannel sheets and kiss her on the forehead before leaving the room; cute but not beautiful.”

C. Thomas Flood wants to be an author, but where he comes from (Indiana) that’s not an acceptable trade for a man. He flees to San Francisco to “starve in the city.” After some misadventures with too many roommates and turkey bowling at the Safeway, he meets Jody and his life is never the same.

“Turkey bowing is not recognized by the NCAA or the Olympic Committee. There are no professional tournaments sponsored by the Poultry Farmers of America, and the footwear companies do not manufacture turkey bowling shoes. … Despite this lack of official recognition, the fine and noble tradition of ‘skidding the buzzard’ is practiced nightly by supermarket night crews all over the nation.”

Christopher Moore takes on the “vampire genre” and it’s not his best effort. If you’re going to read one of his books, I recommend Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.

It’s still ridiculous fictional literature, but I enjoyed the characters in Lamb more. In Blocksucking Fiends, everybody reads like one cliché after another.

“In another time she would have called a girlfriend and spent the evening on the phone being comforted. She would have eaten a half gallon of ice cream and stayed up all night thinking about what she was going to do with her life. .. But that was another time, when she had been a person.”

And perhaps that was Moore’s point. It was as if he was mocking the sub-genre of vampire novels by his one-dimensional characters and thin plot.

Or maybe it is just a sub-par effort.

I don’t think I’ll be picking up the other books in this series.

Thanks for reading!

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• Otherwhere: A Field Guide to Nonphysical Reality for the Out-Of-Body Traveler by Kurt Leland
• Psychic Dreamwalking: Explorations at the Edge of Self by Michelle Belanger
• Archetypes on the Tree of Life: The Tarot as Pathwork by Madonna Compton
• The Goddess and the Shaman: The Art & Science of Magical Healing by J.A. Kent