I was born in Toledo, Ohio. My father was a highway patrolman and my mother worked in a department store. I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, and had a basic suburban childhood that comprised a lot more anxiety than actual hardship. I played football, basketball, and ran track up through ninth grade, when my father announced that if I wanted to drive when I was sixteen I had better get a job. So I got a job. A bunch of jobs.

I worked as a roofer, a night clerk in a grocery store, a factory worker making ceramic Nativity scenes (and I am still remembered for making a mean baby Jesus), an insurance man, photographer, disk jockey, journalist, motel clerk, and a waiter. All of a sudden I was thirty. I had a car, but I was thirty.

Somewhere between those jobs I went to Ohio State for a while, studying anthropology, I moved to California and studied photography at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, and I took a bunch of extension courses in writing. I also lived with a bunch of women who eventually thought it would be a better idea if I lived by myself, and I developed a pretty good drinking problem.

Then all of a sudden, I was thirty (did I already say that?). I was supposed to be famous by the time I was thirty, right? Well, I wasn't. I was a waiter at the Harmony Pasta Factory (Harmony,. CA has a population of 18, unless you count the entire metropolitan Harmony area, then it has a population of 18 and 4 cows). So I thought I better write a book. I quit drinking and started writing. A year later I finished Practical Demonkeeping, and a year after that Disney bought the film rights for the book for (as they say) a major six figure advance. Soon the book was bought by publishers in seven countries and people were asking me when the next one was due. I figured it took me 32 years to do the first one, I should have the second one done sometime around the year 2023. But all of a sudden I had readers, and my readers didn't want to wait.

Demonkeeping- The Aftermath

After the entertainment media covered the sale of Practical Demonkeeping I became, what is known in the business, as "the flavor of the month". As far as I can tell, this involves meeting with a lot of movie producers who say things like "we’d like to work with you", but who aren’t allowed to actually asked you to do any work without paying you for it. This is sort of an invitation to pitch a screenplay. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that, so I missed the opportunity to become a big-time screenwriter guy. Not that I wanted to do that, but it would have been nice to know what was going on.

Big time writers were hired to write scripts for Demonkeeping, but nothing that Disney wanted to make. Now the book is with Sony and yet another script (number 12, I think) is in the works with that company.

From the time Demonkeeping sold I’ve lived my life in books, not years. I never remember what year things happened, only what book I was working on. For a writer, I think that's a good thing. You miss a lot of appointments living that way, but you get your work done.

Coyote Blue

During my research for Demonkeeping I kept running across trickster characters,: gods whose sole purpose seemed to be to goof on people. I wanted to bring one, the Native American god Coyote, to be specific, into the modern world. The idea of a god that specifically exists as an avatar of irony intrigued me, and I wanted to see what I could do with the concept. I was also interested in writing a book that was more theme-driven, rather than plot driven like Demonkeeping. I set out to find an Indian tribe that was still vital enough to provide the background for my book.

I ended up in Montana on the Crow reservation, where I lived in an Airstream travel trailer with a 300 pound flatulent photographer (which is another story altogether). I remember hanging out on the reservation, thinking, "I'm never going to figure out how to do this book," with a basic idea for a plot, but no real "holy grail" to drive the characters. Theme driven was fine, but there had to be a story too.

Then one afternoon, the photographer and I were having lunch with the director of public relations for the Crow tribe. He had brought along his girlfriend as well as her father, and old Crow guy who could have been fifty or could have been eighty. I just couldn't tell. Throughout the meal the old guy would say things like, "I died three times, and after the third time I woke up to find that I could speak all languages."

The PR guy and his girlfriend would look at us embarrassedly, then the conversation would resume until the old guy would burst out again, "I can bust a tumor as big as a grapefruit. Came a time when I died the third time and all the bundle carriers were afraid of me. You die three times and ain't no one can kill you then. You get too powerful."

"Kay," I said.

Anyway, after the meal, I lit up a cigarette and offered one to the old guy. He accepted with a huge grin, and over the course of the next hour I gave him two or three more smokes. When we got up to leave, I waved the pack to him, and said "keep it, I have a carton in the trailer."

The old guy immediately invited me to his house for a sweat. It turns out, that the old guy was a shaman, and that I had just given him a sacred gift - the gift of tobacco. He was obliged to acknowledge my gift with a sweat in my honor. So I went to the old guy's sweat lodge that night, and he performed the sweat for me, the photographer, his sons and grandsons, and after a lot of chanting and singing and sweating (yeah, that's why they call it a sweat, duh) the old guy started telling stories about the carriers of the sacred medicine bundles, and how the arrow bundle, of which there had only been three made, could bring the dead back to life.

The old guy had given me my Holy Grail for the new book. And what better Coyote Medicine, than to have an insignificant gift become the key to an entire novel.

After a month on the reservation it started to snow and I decided I had what I needed for the book (did I mention that I loathe cold weather). I returned to California, bought a house, and began writing Coyote Blue. A couple of years later Simon & Schuster published the book.

Bloodsucking Fiends - A Love Story

My contract with Simon and Schuster dictated that I present several ideas to them for my third book. If things went right, they would like on of them and I would get paid for writing the book. I had run across an old independent film called The World According to Lightning Hopkins, a documentary featuring the Texas blues singer and his friends. I was so taken with the way these guys lived and sang, that I plotted a book around a couple of old blues guys from the Mississippi Delta who finally, in their eighties, make their way to Chicago to make a record, just to show the world that they were every bit as good as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and some of their other contemporaries. This book was meticulously worked out, and I was confident that my editors would choose it as my next book. Among the five ideas I submitted, however, was a hastily plotted vampire story that I had once written to do on radio, when I was doing that sort of thing. As it turned out, that was the one that Simon and Schuster picked. My blues guys went on the shelf.

In a way, I was relieved that I would be doing a book set in San Francisco, rather than the Delta, which would have been much more difficult to research. And after thinking about it for a while, I realized that a vampire story was no suitable vehicle for BIG THEMES, and that most of the logistics of the genre had been worked out long ago by other writers. In a word, I was free. Free to just write funny stuff. No themes, no reinventing the wheel, just taking the goofiness of the situation and running with it.

I went to San Francisco and lived for a month, walking the streets and spending an awful lot of time just watching people. I knew my main character was going to be a woman, sort of an answer to those critics who had attacked me for my portrayal of the California Airhead, Calliope, in Coyote Blue. When I saw a woman on a bus with the most incredible, waist-length red hair, I knew I had the physical appearance for Jody. The rest was just a year of writing the adventures of two smart-asses. Tommy, the other main character, was based more than somewhat on myself at the same age(19).

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

For the next book I felt it was time to get out and do some research. The deadline on Fiends made it difficult for me to go anywhere remote, but now that I was clear of my contract with Simon & Schuster, it was time to set a book in some exotic location. When I was waiting tables a guy used to come into the restaurant where I was working and tell great stories about Micronesia. I knew little about the place except that a lot of important World War II battles had taken place there, so armed with that little bit of knowledge, I set out for the island of Truk, where I knew that 70 Japanese ships had been sunk during an Allied bombing raid called Operation Hail Storm. My thinking: "I'll get the material I need for a book, and get some really cool wreck diving in as well."

As it turned out, the diving was great, but what I was looking for, an island where the natives lived in traditional ways, was not to be found in the Truk atoll. I asked around and eventually was sent to the outer islands of Yap (yes, I know, it sounds like the place where they raise small dogs). I was an anthro student at Ohio State, and although I loved the subject, I didn't have the discipline to finish my degree, so here was my chance to put some of what I learned into action.

After a month in the islands, much of it living with a chief and his family on an island where the highest level of technology is a thermos, I had what I needed for the book. Actually, I was just tired of living in the stone age, so I went home hoping that I had what I needed for the book. As it turned out, if I had really done my research on cargo cults before leaving for the South Pacific, I would have ended up in Melanesia instead of Micronesia, but since I did the academic research after the field research, I had to make it work.

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

There's a lot of traveling in Love Nun, and because of this, the main character would meet a character, then move on never to see them again. I missed working with multiple characters whose lives all affected each other, and who I could revisit throughout the story. It was time to return to Pine Cove, the small town I created in Demonkeeping, where every tomorrow seems like yesterday, and one little shake up can rattle through the town's whole population. Pine Cove, of course, is based on the California coastal village where I live. It was time to come home.

I had begun to notice that many of my friends were taking antidepressants and in any given week, it seemed that one or another of them was taking themselves off of their medication and creating a crisis situation in their lives. I talked to a psychiatrist about this phenomenon and he explained about all the symptoms of withdrawal from antidepressants: nausea, increased depression, anxiety, and increased libido. As I tried to deal with what seemed "a crazy friend a week" it occurred to me that it would be a lot easier if they would all go off of their drugs at once, so I could set a week aside to be a good friend and be done with it. Therein lay the plot for the next book: "What happens if you take an entire town off of their medication al at once."

Of course, that would never be enough for one of my books, so the plot became "What happens if you take a whole town off of their medication and their depression attracts an ancient predator who is specially adapted to feed on the depressed."

So, with the creation of Steve the sea monster, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove was born and released from Avon in the spring of 1999.

LAMB - The Adventures of Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend

After finishing my second book set in Pine Cove, which turned out to be a fairly plot-driven book, I felt it was time to take on a project that was more theme-driven, and something that would involve more research - that would open me and my readers to a new body of knowledge. For years friends had be recommending that I read a book called The Master and Margarita , by Mikhail Bulgakov. While most of the book is a mystical tale set in post-revolutionary Russia, there is a section that depicts the trial of Jesus from the point of view of Pontius Pilate. Pilate is depicted as having a migraine, and trying to be fair in the midst of his own irritation. What that scene did, because of the point of view, was to make a story that I'd heard a thousand times become very real in my mind's eye. I wondered what would happen if you told the whole story of Jesus in that manner, and I began to ponder.

A month or so passed, and PBS began running a mini-series called From Jesus to Christ , which explored the life of Jesus through interviews with noted scholars, archeologists, historians and theologians. It was fascinating, but the thing that struck me most profoundly was finding out that the gospels had left a thirty year hole in the telling of Jesus' life. "Someone should tell that part of the story, " I thought. "And since I know nothing about religion or history, I should be that someone."

I set off researching the historical context for the life of Christ, realizing that if I was going to make the story funny, I was going to have to create a character with a strong voice to tell the story. I wanted the immediacy of a first person narrator, someone who was there, but I didn't want to be limited by the people who were actually named in the Bible, so I created Biff, Christ's childhood pal, the thirteenth Apostle, to tell the story. The rest was a balancing act, to try to keep the story entertaining and funny, without making the book appear to be an attack book. While I had distinct issues with the way the Christian religion had been bent to serve the agenda of man, I had no issue with the actual teachings of Jesus, so I wanted to portray him with respect, and with the acceptance that he was who the New Testament said he was: The Son of God. The fun in the story came out of Biff trying to be the loyal friend of the guy who would save the world, and there-by, get all the attention.

I finished the book in the fall of 2000 and William Morrow released it in March of 2002. Since then, despite what many people had anticipated, the response to Lamb has been overwhelmingly positive, even among clergy and seminarians.

Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

When you write novels for a living, you soon realize that you are going to spend a great deal of time sitting down, reading or writing, and not really living much of real life. Except for a short, three-week tour of Israel, looking at historical sites, most of the research for Lamb had been academic, and I felt like I wanted to get out an really do something. I've really come to love being in the ocean, scuba-diving and snorkeling, and I hadn't really spent much time doing that stuff since I researched Love Nun, so I went looking for a water project.

Some years before I'd had a conversation with my agent, Nick Ellison, about whale song, and Nick suggested that there might be a story built around there being some specific meaning imbedded in the song. I sort of filed the information, but now it seemed like it might be a great project to pursue. An architect friend of mine, who is also an ocean enthusiast, had been diving with singing humpbacks in Tahiti, and the experience had had a profound effect on him. I wanted to get in the water with those big boys myself, and so I set out to make it happen, and hopefully to get a good story out of the experience as well.

After a couple of false starts, I got in touch with some whale researchers in Hawaii who were studying Humpback singers. They invited me to come over and observe their work, which I did for two winters. Just a short time around these incredible people and I realized that I wanted to write about the people who study whales, not the whales themselves, and I began plotting Fluke. The book was finished in the fall of 2002 and came out summer 2003.

I returned to work with the researchers in Maui in the spring of 2003, even though the book was finished. They put me on the research permit as a shark spotter (someone who stays at the surface and watches for approaching sharks whenever someone is filming the humpbacks) and in that capacity I was able to get in the water with the singers.

From there, it's going to be a return to Pine Cove, for the last time, probably, to write a Christmas story in what has become my literary home town. I'm currently working on the Stupidest Angel, which should be released by William Morrow in the fall of 2004

- Christopher Moore 9/07/03 Big Sur