Fool
“Hilarious, always inventive, this is a book for all, especially uptight English teachers, bardolaters, and ministerial students.”
Dallas Morning News

Fool—the bawdy and outrageous New York Times bestseller from the unstoppable Christopher Moore—is a hilarious new take on William Shakespeare’s King Lear…as seen through the eyes of the foolish liege’s clownish jester, Pocket. A rousing tale of “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity,” Fool joins Moore’s own Lamb, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel, and You Suck! as modern masterworks of satiric wit and sublimely twisted genius, prompting Carl Hiassen to declare Christopher Moore “a very sick man, in the very best sense of the word.”

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Fool
“Hilarious, always inventive, this is a book for all, especially uptight English teachers, bardolaters, and ministerial students.”
Dallas Morning News

Fool—the bawdy and outrageous New York Times bestseller from the unstoppable Christopher Moore—is a hilarious new take on William Shakespeare’s King Lear…as seen through the eyes of the foolish liege’s clownish jester, Pocket. A rousing tale of “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity,” Fool joins Moore’s own Lamb, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel, and You Suck! as modern masterworks of satiric wit and sublimely twisted genius, prompting Carl Hiassen to declare Christopher Moore “a very sick man, in the very best sense of the word.”

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Fool

Fool

by Christopher Moore
Fool

Fool

by Christopher Moore

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Overview

“Hilarious, always inventive, this is a book for all, especially uptight English teachers, bardolaters, and ministerial students.”
Dallas Morning News

Fool—the bawdy and outrageous New York Times bestseller from the unstoppable Christopher Moore—is a hilarious new take on William Shakespeare’s King Lear…as seen through the eyes of the foolish liege’s clownish jester, Pocket. A rousing tale of “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity,” Fool joins Moore’s own Lamb, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel, and You Suck! as modern masterworks of satiric wit and sublimely twisted genius, prompting Carl Hiassen to declare Christopher Moore “a very sick man, in the very best sense of the word.”


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060590321
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 02/23/2010
Series: Chronicles of Pocket the Fool Series , #1
Pages: 328
Sales rank: 126,148
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Christopher Moore is the author of eighteen previous novels, including Razzmatazz, Shakespeare for SquirrelsNoirSecondhand Souls, Sacré Bleu, Fool, and Lamb. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Hometown:

Hawaii and San Francisco, California

Date of Birth:

August 5, 1958

Place of Birth:

Toledo, Ohio

Read an Excerpt

Fool

Chapter One

Always a Bloody Ghost

"Tosser!" cried the raven.

There's always a bloody raven.

"Foolish teachin' him to talk, if you ask me," said the sentry.

"I'm duty-bound foolish, yeoman," said I. I am, you know? A fool. Fool to the court of Lear of Britain. "And you are a tosser," I said.

"Piss off!" said the raven.

The yeoman took a swipe at the bird with his spear and the great black bird swooped off the wall and went cawing out over the Thames. A ferryman looked up from his boat, saw us on the tower, and waved. I jumped onto the wall and bowed...at your fucking service, thank you. The yeoman grumbled and spat after the raven.

There have always been ravens at the White Tower. A thousand years ago, before George II, idiot king of Merica, destroyed the world, there were ravens here. The legend says that as long as there are ravens at the Tower, England will stand strong. Still, it may have been a mistake to teach one to talk.

"The Earl of Gloucester approaches!" cried a sentry on the west wall. "With his son Edgar and the bastard Edmund!"

The yeoman by me grinned. "Gloucester, eh? Be sure you do that bit where you play a goat and Drool plays the earl mistaking you for his wife."

"That would be unkind," said I. "The earl is newly widowed."

"You did it the last time he was here and she was still warm in the grave."

"Well, yes. A service that...trying to shock the poor wretch out of his grief, wasn't it?"

"Good show, too. The way you was bleatin' I thought ol' Drool was givin' it to you right proper up the bung."

I made a note to shove the guard off the wall whenopportunity presented.

"Heard he was going to have you assassinated, but he couldn't make a case to the king."

"Gloucester's a noble, he doesn't need a case for murder, just a whim and a blade."

"Not bloody likely," the yeoman said, "everyone knows the king's got a wing o'er you."

That was true. I enjoy a certain license.

"Have you seen Drool? With Gloucester here, there'll be a command performance." My apprentice, Drool...a beef-witted bloke the size of a draught horse.

"He was in the kitchen before the watch," said the yeoman.

The kitchen buzzed...the staff preparing for a feast.

"Have you seen Drool ?" I asked Taster, who sat at the table staring sadly at a bread trencher laid out with cold pork, the king's dinner. He was a thin, sickly lad, chosen, no doubt, for his weakness of constitution, and a predisposition toward dropping dead at the slightest provocation. I liked to tell him my troubles, sure that they would not travel far.

"Does this look poisoned to you?"

"It's pork, lad. Lovely. Eat up. Half the men in England would give a testicle to feast thus, and it only mid-day. I'm tempted myself." I tossed my head...gave him a grin and a bit of a jingle on the ol' hat bells to cheer him. I pantomimed stealing a bit of his pork. "After you, of course."

A knife thumped into the table by my hand.

"Back, Fool," said Bubble, the head cook. "That's the king's lunch and I'll have your balls before I'll let you at it."

"My balls are yours for the asking, milady," said I. "Would you have them on a trencher, or shall I serve them in a bowl of cream, like peaches?"

Bubble harrumphed, yanked her knife from the table and went back to gutting a trout at the butcher block, her great bottom rolling like thunderclouds under her skirt as she moved.

"You're a wicked little man, Pocket," said Squeak, waves of freckles riding o'er her shy smile. She was second to the cook, a sturdy, ginger-haired girl with a high giggle and a generous spirit in the dark. Taster and I often passed pleasant afternoons at the table watching her wring the necks of chickens.

Pocket is my name, by the way. Given to me by the abbess who found me on the nunnery doorstep when I was a tiny babe. True, I am not a large fellow. Some might even say I am diminutive, but I am quick as a cat and nature has compensated me with other gifts. But wicked?

"I think Drool was headed to the princess's chambers," Squeak said.

"Aye," said Taster, glumly. "The lady sent for a cure for melancholy."

"And the git went?" Jest on his own? The boy wasn't ready. What if he blundered, tripped, fell on the princess like a millstone on a butterfly? "Are you sure?"

Bubble dropped a gutless trout into a bushel of slippery co-fishes. "Chanting, 'Off to do ma duty,' he was. We told him you'd be looking for him when we heard Princess Goneril and the Duke of Albany was coming."

"Albany's coming?"

"Ain't he sworn to string your entrails from the chandelier?" asked Taster.

"No," corrected Squeak. "That was Duke of Cornwall. Albany was going to have his head on a pike, I believe. Pike, wasn't it, Bubble?"

"Aye, have his head on a pike. Funny thing, thinkin' about it, you'd look like a bigger version of your puppet-stick there."

"Jones," said Taster, pointing to my jester's scepter, Jones, who is, indeed, a smaller version of my own handsome countenance, fixed atop a sturdy handle of polished hickory. Jones speaks for me when even my tongue needs to exceed safe license with knights and nobles, his head pre-piked for the wrath of the dull and humorless. My finest art is oft lost in the eye of the subject.

"Yes, that would be right hilarious, Bubble...ironic imagery...like the lovely Squeak turning you on a spit over a fire, an apple up both your ends for color...although I daresay the whole castle might conflagrate in the resulting grease fire, but until then we'd laugh and laugh."

Fool. Copyright © by Christopher Moore. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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