The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
Lizard

 
A note from the author,  
Dear Reader,

Like most of you, I woke up one day to find that everyone I knew was taking antidepressants, and since I wasn't, I figured that I must be the cause of their depression. Friends explained that I was paranoid that everyone was on antidepressants, even people who didn't know meant that I
should just chill and get a prescription for Prozac or Zoloft or something. So I thought. Hey, if so many people are depressed, maybe depression is supposed to serve some purpose in the evolution of the human species. (Like keeping us from getting so cheerful that we forget to eat.) Or perhaps, like  nearsightedness, depression is something that would have been selected out in the wild. (Saber-toothed tigers always ate the member of the tribe wearing the thick glasses.) And perhaps a predator had evolved that was specifically adapted to prey on the depressed (much as the sabertooths adapted to feed on early nerds). And what if one of these predators still existed and was drawn to a small town where everyone had suddenly been taken off antidepressants? And what if his name was Steve?

Well, I'm sure you were thinking the same thing. So that's why I wrote this book for you.

Sincerely,

Christopher Moore

January '99, California
 
 


 		    
  It's September in Pine Grove, California, where the tourists have finally decamped for the season, the sun is slanting through the trees, and the local psychiatrist has just decided to switch everyone from antidepressants to placebos at the Head of the Slug Saloon, where a melancholy blues man from the Mississippi Delta has settled in for the winter.  Unfortunately for the town's newly minted blues fans, however, a colossal sea beast is also drawn to the sound of the slide guitar.  When a tanker truck explodes at the local gas station, it's the first sign that all hell is about to break loose in Pine Cove.

Can the unlikely constable Theophilus Crowe curb his gonzo appetites long enough to find out who -- or what -- is behind the explosion and the resulting series of mysterious crimes?  Can Molly Michon, the has-been scream queen and resident crazy lady, control her dual personalities?  Can anyone explain why a town so morose is suddenly so... libidinous?  And what's the story behind the mysterious trailer that has just shown up in the back corner of the local trailer park?

  


 		    
  From Kirkus Reviews , February 15, 1999
Godzilla comes to Pine Cove, nestled somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in Moore's latest foray into the zany and the zonked. If Steve Martin ever wrote a novel, it might be something like Moore's farcical labors in the field of psychotropic fiction. Here, one knows from the start that not only is nothing sacred to the author but also that nothing is important, and by mid-novel you're doubtful that anything life-changing will come of this bemused cartooning. Even so, Moore's latest is marginally less sick and more serious than 1997's Island of the Sequined Love Nun. It's September in Pine Cove. Cleaning freak Bess Leander has just hung herself. Investigating is stoned constable Theophilus Crowe. Meanwhile, Bess's therapist, Valerie Riordan, who counsels a large number of the towns population and keeps them tranquilized on a variety of psychotropics, gets scared by the statistic that 15 percent of all depressed people commit suicide. This means that perhaps more than 200 of her patients are slated for self-exit, despite her widely dispensed pills for which she gets a kickback from the local druggist, a dolphin fetishist. When her qualms overcome her, Val instructs the druggist to replace the pills with placebos. As autumn leaves fall, her patients go into withdrawal and self-medicate, en masse, with alcohol. What's more, elderly Delta guitarist Catfish Jefferson has just been hired to play at the Head of the Slug Saloon, where his marvelously sad blues add to the local scenes seductive narcosis. Fifty years ago down on the Delta, Catfish first met the Sea Beast, a hundred-foot creature that loved his steel guitar and that has now risen from the depths, awakened by a sexy nuclear radiation leak, to blister the countryside with radiant energies of lust . . . . Patches of good writing break through the looniness and give hope for better things from Moore when his hare-brained imagination settles down. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. 		 

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