Practical Demon Keeping, by Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore may have a new devotee.

I happened to pick this book up only because I was intrigued by the title and the illustration on the cover. I'm glad I did too, because Demon Keeping is one of the funniest books that I've read in a long time.

The book is set along coastal southern California (an area I'm very familiar with, which just made the book even better for me) in a little town called Pine Cove. It starts with a man named Travis, who has a demon familiar who keeps eating people that Travis encounters. Travis is in search of a person he might have met years ago, and thinks this person may be in Pine Cove. He goes there with Catch (his demon) to find him, and instead finds a woman that he falls in love with.

Meanwhile a resident of Pine Cove, an older gentleman by the name of Augustus Brine, is approached by the King of the Djinn, who has a special mission for him: catch Catch and send him back to where he came from. This all sounds really far out, but the setting and the people are really what make this book so realistic and so endearing.

The characterization of the Pine Cove residents made this book the pleasure that it was to read. From Mavis, the eavesdropping bar owner, to Rivera, the police detective with aspirations of failure, to 'Roxanne', the male night auditor at a motel who moonlights as a seductive temptress online, the people of Pine Cove are the driving force behind this "Comedy of Horrors."

Perhaps the funniest of all was Catch himself, who likes to read Cookie Monster comics and has a love for Magic Fingers. Catch cannot be seen by anyone except Travis except for when he is in his eating form. Then he is a lizard-like giant with a deadly sense of humor. Some of his lines had me rolling. And I'm notoriously hard to please when it comes to sarcastic humor in books, having had my literary teeth cut on the likes of Nelson DeMille.

All in all, I give this book four stars out of five. Only four because of a few plot holes I spotted, which do not detract from the book at all unless you're as anal as I am about plot holes. It was an excellent book for an author's first efforts.

Now I'm off to find the rest of Moore's writing.