The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

by Christopher Moore Narrated by Oliver Wyman

Overview

The town psychiatrist has decided to switch everybody in Pine Cove, California, from their normal antidepressants to placebos, so naturally-well, to be accurate, artificially-business is booming at the local blues bar. Trouble is, those lonely slide-guitar notes have also attracted a colossal sea beast named Steve with, shall we say, a thing for explosive oil tanker trucks. Suddenly, morose Pine Cove turns libidinous and is hit by a mysterious crime wave, and a beleaguered constable has to fight off his own gonzo appetites to find out what's wrong and what, if anything, to do about it.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
You can't judge a book by its cover, but what about its title? The same day that I finished Kai Bird's The Color of Truth, a masterpiece account of the JFK-era State Department, I found in my mailbox my next review assignment, a novel called The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Grove.

The...what? I thought. Still riveted by images of the major decisions behind the Vietnam War, I'm suddenly reading a comedic investigative mystery about a sea monster named Steve.

That's right, a sea monster.

Named Steve.

Here's the first line of Chapter One: "As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good." See, Bess, a rather typical middle-class housewife, has seen fit to hang herself in her dining room. (Major plot point: Bess was previously being treated with antidepressants.) Shortly thereafter, I'm introduced to Theo, a local police chief who grows marijuana in his backyard; Molly, an over-the-hill psychotic scream queen who bites people when slighted; a tavern called The Head of the Slug; a pharmacist with a romantic proclivity for dolphins; and, to synopsize, a novel whose thematics revolve around...Prozac.

Now, let me try to write this review.

Pine Cove might be an ordinary California town, but Dr. Val Riordan, the local shrink, is hardly your ordinary psychiatrist. One day, she goes a bit off and decides that antidepressant drugs (like Prozac, Effexor, and Zoloft) actually cause depressed patients (like Bess Leander) to commit suicide. So she switches all of her patients' medications with useless sugar pills...neglecting, of course, to tell thepatients.Hence, the main catalyst of this novel.

Meanwhile, Theo, our perpetually stoned cop, can't help but notice the seemingly instantaneous upsurge of violence, crime, missing persons, and overall whacked-out behavior amongst the normally sedate populace. There also seems to be an upsurge in, uh, sexual behavior.

What's going on here?

Well, a lot. A minuscule leak of radioactive waste water from a nearby nuclear power plant revives a prehistoric sea monster. Named Steve. (Well, actually, it's the psychotic scream queen who names the sea beast, after her long-dead goldfish.) Anyway, Steve decides to slake his hunger (and, regrettably, his lust) on (you guessed it) the tranquil seaside town of Pine Cove. Why exactly has Steve decided to rear his brontosaurine head over Pine Cove?

Only the mysterious blues guitarist knows for sure....

Weird enough yet? The press release for this book describes it as "Godzilla" meets The Bridges of Madison County. I'd say that's a proper analogy. And as for weird book titles, here are some others by author Christopher Moore: Practical Demonkeeping, Bloodsucking Fiends, Island of the Sequined Love Nun. In addition to these titles, acclaimed Strip Tease author Carl Hiaasen describes Moore as "a very sick man," but "in the very best sense of the word." How's that for an endorsement!

See, Lust Lizard is a crazy book about crazy people in a crazy world. It's about the sheer abnormality of normalcy.

It's also about Prozac. And a sea monster named —

well, I've already been over that. Moore's creative result proves to be the weirdest novels I've ever read and also, easily, one of the funniest. The story has as many personalities as its characters have personality disorders. Part mystery, part postmodern fable, part hallucinotic comedy, Lust Lizard is about what might happen to "regular" people when they are divorced from the "regular" things in our society. No one's really regular to begin with, but that's Moore's point. There's more social allegory and encrypted symbolism in this book than you can shake a copy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis at. It's also so funny you'll be laughing yourself to tears. Lines like "I've never kissed a guy with assistant principal on his breath" and a scene in which a 75-foot sea monster tries to have intercourse with a gasoline truck are only the first lap of this erotomanic, pop-bizarro, off-the-wall psychotropic joyride.

Risking brain damage and likely schizophrenic episodes, I'm going to go back and read all of Moore's previous work, and as for the Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, don't miss it unless you want to miss what is thus far 1999's funniest and most uniquely entertaining novel.

Er, wait a minute. Maybe I didn't really read this book. Maybe it doesn't really exist.

Maybe somebody spiked my Prozac with LSD....

— Edward Lee

Playboy

If there's a funnier writer out there, step forward.

Kirkus Reviews

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 town's 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 scene's 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.

Playboy

If there’s a funnier writer out there, step forward.”

Miami Herald

Reads like Christopher Moore laughed his head off while writing it, quite possibly taking hits of nitrous oxide between sentences.”

AudioFile

Moore’s amusing tale of sex, drugs, and sea creatures gains a second life in the voice of Oliver Wyman…Wyman’s soft, congenial voice proves perfect for Moore’s sardonic yet bemused tone, especially when paired with characters such as Constable Theophilus Crowe. Wyman maintains a nuanced and steady narrative while also portraying a cast of multiple species with eccentric and, often, slightly perverted personalities.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173403827
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/04/2009
Series:	Pine Cove Series , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

Chapter One

As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good: lavender, sage, and a hint of clove. There were seven Shaker chairs hung on pegs on the walls of the Leanders' dining room. The eighth was overturned under Bess, who hung from the peg by a calico cloth rope around her neck. Dried flowers, baskets of various shapes and sizes, and bundles of dried herbs hung from the open ceiling beams.

Theophilus Crowe knew he should be doing cop stuff, but he just stood there with two emergency medical technicians from the Pine Cove Fire Department, staring up at Bess as if they were inspecting the newly installed angel on a Christmas tree. Theo thought the pastel blue of Bess's skin went nicely with her cornflower-blue dress and the patterns of the English china displayed on simple wooden shelves at the end of the room. It was 7 A.m. and Theo, as usual, was a little stoned.

Theo could hear sobs coming from upstairs, where Joseph Leander held his two daughters, who were still in their nightgowns. There was no evidence of a masculine presence anywhere in the house. It was Country Cute: bare pine floors and bent willow baskets, flowers and rag dolls and herb-flavored vinegars in blown-glass bottles; Shaker antiques, copper kettles, embroidery samplers, spinning wheels, lace doilies, and porcelain placards with prayers from the Dutch. Not a sports page or remote control in sight. Not a thing out of place or a speck of dust anywhere. Joseph Leander must have walked very light to live in this house without leaving tracks. A man less sensitive than Theo might have called him whipped.

"That guy's whipped," one of theEMTs said. His name was Vance McNally. He was fifty-one, short and muscular, and wore his hair slicked back with oil, just as he had in high school. Occasionally, in his capacity as an EMT, he saved lives, which was his rationalization for being a dolt the rest of the time.

"He just found his wife hanging in the dining room, Vance," Theo pronounced over the heads of the EMTs. He was six-foot-six, and even in his flannel shirt and sneakers he could loom large when he needed to assert some authority.

"She looks like Raggedy Ann," said Mike, the other EMT, who was in his early twenties and excited to be on his first suicide call.

"I heard she was Amish," Vance said.

"She's not Amish," Theo said.

"I didn't say she was Amish, I just said I heard that. I figured she wasn't Amish when I saw the blender in the kitchen. Amish don't believe in blenders, do they?"

"Mennonite," Mike said with as much authority as his junior status would afford.

"What's a Mennonite?" Vance asked.

"Amish with blenders."

"She wasn't Amish," Theo said.

"She looks Amish," Vance said.

"Well, her husband's not Amish," Mike said.

"How can you tell?" Vance said. "He has a beard."

"Zipper on his jacket," Mike said. "Amish don't have zippers."

Vance shook his head. "Mixed marriages. They never work."

"She wasn't Amish!" Theo shouted.

"Think what you want, Theo, there's a butter chum in the living room. I think that says it all."

Mike rubbed at a mark on the wall beneath Bess's feet where her black buckled shoes had scraped as she convulsed.

"Don't touch anything," Theo said.

"Why? She can't yell at us, she's dead. We wiped our feet on the way in," Vance said.

Mike stepped away from the wall. "Maybe she couldn't stand anything touching her floors. Hanging was the only way."

Not to be outdone by the detective work of his protege Vance said, "You know, the sphincters usually open up on a hanging victim-leave an awful mess. I'm wondering if she actually hanged herself."

"Shouldn't we call the police?" Mike said.

"I am the police," Theo said. He was Pine Cove's only constable, duly elected eight years ago and reelected every other year thereafter.

"No, I mean the real police," Mike said.

"I'll radio the sheriff," Theo said. "I don't think there's anything you can do here, guys. Would you mind calling Pastor Williams from the Presbyterian church to come over? I need to talk to Joseph and I need someone to stay with the girls."

"They were Presbyterians?" Vance seemed shocked. He had really put his heart into the Amish theory.

"Please call," Theo said. He left the EMTs and went out through the kitchen to his Volvo, where he switched the radio over to the frequency used by the San Junipero Sheriff's Department, then sat there staring at the mike. He was going to catch hell from Sheriff Burton for this.

"North Coast is yours, Theo. All yours," the sheriff had said. My deputies will pick up suspects, answer robbery calls, and let the Highway Patrol investigate traffic accidents on Highway 1, that's it. Otherwise, you keep them out of Pine Cove and your little secret stays secret." Theo was forty-one years old and he still felt as if he was hiding from the junior high vice principal, laying low. Things like this weren't supposed to happen in Pine Cove. Nothing happened in Pine Cove.

He took a quick hit from his Sneaky Pete smokeless pot pipe before keying the mike and calling in the deputies.

Joseph Leander sat on the edge of the bed. He'd changed out of his pajamas into a blue business suit, but his thinning hair was still sticking out in sleep horns on the side. He was thirty-five, sandy-haired, thin but working on a paunch that strained the buttons of his vest. Theo sat across from him on a chair, holding a notepad. They could hear the sheriff's deputies moving around downstairs.

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

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