Practical Demon-Keeping: A Comedy of Horrors
by Christopher Moore
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Harper (New York): 1992. Trade paperback: 256 pages. ISBN-10: 0-06-073542-2 ISBN-13: 978-0060735425 Suggested retail price: $13.95 (US) Tags: candlesticks; covens; demons; djinn; drugs; Humor; police; priests; witches; Zen Tactical strength: [5/10] |
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Christopher Moore's Practical Demon Keeping reads like a movie treatment. You get just enough detail about the characters to understand what they would wear and give them sufficient motivation to make their actions believable, but you never get enough depth about any single character to really make an attachment -- or even really care much about what happens. With such shallow characters, Moore relies on his dry humor and a quick moving plot to keep you entertained. You do occasionally laugh, but again, many of the scenes would produce many more laughs if seen on a screen than on a page. For example, at one point one of the characters wants to make sure that he can detect an invisible demon and builds a bomb out of primer caps and flower. After trying to extinguish the subsequent fireball, the character stands in the middle of a yard covered in a pasty, white mess. You can mentally picture the scene and get a mild laugh, but the scene produced for a movie would have the audience rolling in the aisles.
Travis, a young seminary student, accidentally summons the demon Catch from hell while polishing a set of silver candlesticks. After the demon eats one of the seminary priests, Travis goes on the run. The demon must generally obey Travis's will, but the demon must also feed on humans, which Travis tries to limit the demon's menu to criminals and the homeless. Travis goes on the run, and when a kind woman pays his train passage, he gives her the candlesticks. Subsequently, Travis realizes that he needs the candlesticks to send Catch back to hell. Through association with Catch, Travis never ages, and he has spent most of the past 70 years searching for the woman with the candlesticks. He has one clue, the woman planned to marry a World War I veteran with the initials E.E. Tracing every possible veteran with those initials, Travis comes to Pine Cove -- a California coastal tourist town -- to see if Effrom Elliot's wife might have the candlesticks. Pine Cove houses an eclectic collection of characters that just might have the collected ability to send Catch back to hell: a cross-dressing motel clerk, a new-age witch and her feminist coven, a failed portrait photographer and his wife the waitress, an amateur eschatologist fluent in ancient Greek, a bumbling police detective, and a Zen-practicing general store owner. The story progresses at a fast pace in a light tone and with a sense of humor that keeps Practical Demon-Keeping out of the Horror section. Not spellbinding storytelling, but nice light entertainment good for a break from more challenging fiction.
