Balls Jr. #9: The Stupidest Angel - Christopher Moore

"You can't just say 'retarded' in public like that--people take offense because, you know, many of them are."

Chris, I will always have a place in my empty shell of a heart for you for Lamb, but The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, despite a smashing name and a smashing Author's Warning*, is not going to enlarge that spot. It was very inconsistent, felt unsatisfying and insubstantial, and overall, despite some great lines and characters, failed to win me over.

Dale Pearson is an "evil developer," evilly buying ice and refusing to throw some money into his ex-wife Lena's Salvation Army kettle. I am extremely not in love with his set-up. He's "evil," cheated on his wife, has no hesitation about using physical violence to get Lena to stop annoying him, and soon comes after her with a gun. [EARLY, NOT REALLY SPOILER] And he just so happens to lose his balance while trying to shoot her, so that he, whoops!, falls neck-first on her shovel. How convenient. He's too one-dimensional. The only reason we might have for sympathy is that somebody is stealing his trees, but even that we can't be mad about, because Lena is a "Robin Hood" of Christmas trees. So then we're supposed to root for her, and a stranger who only wants to fuck her, while they dispose of evidence and bury the body. [/NOT REALLY SPOILER]

I'm not sure why I bothered with spoiler tags there, because it happens in the beginning of the book and provides the foundation for the rest of the plot and Moore spoils it himself. Raziel, who was also in Lamb, comes to Pine Cove to find a boy and grant him his Christmas wish. See, the boy witnessed the death of Dale Pearson while he was in a Santa costume, so he prays that Christmas will be all better and Santa will be fine. Raziel is stupid, as per the title, and he accidentally raises Dale and every other corpse rotting away in the cemetary, and it's zombie time! The zombie time is actually rather limited, and most of the time is spent on Lena and Tucker falling in lurrrve, and that's gross. I did not care about any of the myriad romances or quasi-romances, whether it be Lena and pilot, sheriff and crazypants, scientist and snob, and the ending was a cop-out.

The humor was violently up-and-down. I'd laugh out loud at one line, and roll my eyes at the very next sentence. I loved Skinner, and Roberto the Fruitbat, and Raziel. The zombies were also pretty funny. If you really want zombies, though, I'd go with Zombieland. It's a movie, not a book, yes, but it is also better.

*"If you're buying this book as a gift for your grandma or a kid, you should be aware that it contains cusswords as well as tasteful depictions of cannibalism and people in their forties having sex. Don't blame me. I told you."

Balls Jr. #8: The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

It looks like New York got so mad at me for abandoning it for five days that it tried to punish me by heralding my return with a fuck-off blizzard. Well guess what, city? All you managed to do was delay my flight home by thirty minutes, allowing me more time to make out on a hammock in the sunshine, and give me a half day at work. You know, for a city that thinks it's so tough, you are not effective at enacting revenge. Speaking of sunshine...

A year after California real estate mogul Pierce Inverarity dies, his ex-girlfriend Oedipa Maas finds out that she was named executor of his estate. And what a vast, twisty, potentially conspiracy theory-filled estate it is. She discovers the existence of an alternate, underground postal service, and keeps running into signs pointing her towards a conspiracy dating back to the 16th century, revolving around murdered maybe-princes, German war movies, pornographic papal plays, California bookstore arson, and stamp auctions. Oedipa doesn't know if she's going insane, or if she really is finding evidence of a worldwide conspiracy, or if she's hallucinating, or if Inverarity set the whole thing up just to fuck with her.

It's a cool and unique read, with some great descriptive language ("He read the letter and withdrew along a shy string of eyeblinks.") and punny names (Inigo Barfstable. Emory Bortz. Wendell "Mucho" Maas. Mike Fallopian. Genghis Cohen), but I don't know if it was enough to make me want to dive into the gigantic time-suck/mind-fuck that is Gravity's Rainbow. This was enough Pynchon for now.

One of many funny details: Oedipa's lawyer, "wanting at once to be a successful trial lawyer like Perry Mason and, since this was impossible, to destroy Perry Mason by undermining him," had been writing, for years, The Profession v. Perry Mason, A Not-so-hypothetical Indictment.