Interview with Christopher Moore

The comic novel gets lots of laughs, but not lots of love in literary circles. It's quite a coup then that Christopher Moore pleases comedy lovers and critics alike, and commands a sizable cult following. Moore's novels have introduced characters like Roberto, the talking fruit bat in Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Jody, a vampire in love with a Safeway clerk in Bloodsucking Fiends, (who also reappears in the sequel, You Suck: A Love Story), and Biff, his best-known character in the aptly titled Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. His new book, Fool, borrows the court jester character from Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear. Moore shares what he's writing next and explains why readers will never get tired of vampires.

Goodreads: The fool held a bizarre and fascinating position in the royal courts of the Middle Ages. Why were you interested in writing about such a character? And what led you to King Lear?

Christopher Moore: I've always written about rascals and tricksters. Avatars of irony, if you will. And I wanted to write about a character whose whole identity was delivering mirth. The Fool was the least powerful person at court, yet he was the only one who could speak truth to power. I guess part of it came from the fact that our country seemed it was being run by a bunch of liars, criminals, and nitwits, and the only ones who seemed to be pointing it out were the comedians. When I posed the idea to my editor, and said I didn't know whether to make it just any fool or Lear's fool, she jumped on Lear's fool, so that's the direction I went.

GR: William Shakespeare excelled at adapting existing material and making it his own. What do you think Shakespeare himself would say upon reading your adaptation of King Lear?

CM: OMGWTF? Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war! Maybe not. I think Will might be thrown by the bizarre pantheon of Gods that are invoked during the book, but I think he'd be fine with the story.

GR: What are some of your favorite literary love stories?

CM: I love, love, love The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers. My favorite is Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck. And I have to include my own The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, which answers the question, "Can a whole village of crazy people, off their meds, find love despite the fact that a sea monster disguised as a double-wide trailer is eating them?"

GR: Fool includes a fun mix of Elizabethan English and modern slang. How did you develop the book's unique style?

CM: I really had to make it sound Elizabethan, but make it easy for Americans to understand, and, of course, it had to be funny. To be honest, I watched a ton of British sitcoms and dramas on DVD, as well as listened to a lot of audio performances of Shakespeare. I didn't think it would work unless I could write it by ear, so I had to develop an ear for a language that didn't exist. I think it actually works. A lot of it was not so much using a different vocabulary as it was changing the word order. For example, Pocket, our fool, usually attributes his own dialogue as, "said I," rather than "I said." For instance, "'But you are a tosser,'" said I." See, sounds way more Shakespearean.

GR: How extensive was your research on both Shakespeare's play and the time period?

CM: Well, as I say in the afterword, the time frame became a complete jumble, because the real King Lear (spelled Leir), lived around 400 BC, and would probably have been Druid, or worshiped Greek Gods, while the political system in which Shakespeare sets the play is clearly post-Norman invasion, so call it 1200 AD, and the language he tells it in is Elizabethan, roughly 1600 AD. So, my research was wandering around England and France looking at stuff from the 13th century, learning enough British history to know I was going to have to ignore most of it to make the story work, and the linguistic part was studying the plays. Reading them, listening to them on audio, watching them on DVD, and attending as many live performances as I could. I quote or paraphrase at least 12 of the plays, but the good thing is, if you don't know that, it shouldn't make any difference to your enjoyment of the book, which was important to me.

GR: King Lear is one of Shakespeare's bleakest tragedies. Was it challenging to adapt such heavy material into comedy? Or does the heaviest tragedy twist easily into the best comedy?

CM: Well, making it into a comedy allowed me to bring something new to the table. I mean, if I had chosen one of the comedies, I think both As You Like It and Love's Labor Lost have fools in them. But taking a dire tragedy really gave me more meat to work with, and Lear is probably one of the top five best-known plays, so I had that going for me. My favorite play is probably A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I think that playing with that is the work for directors and actors. Turning Lear into a comedy about the fool makes it less of an interpretation and more of a new story.

GR: Comedy is a huge industry. However, it is most often packaged in films, sitcoms, and stand-up. Is written comedy more difficult than performance-based comedy? Why is there not more comedic fiction? (And thanks for your contribution to the genre!)

CM: There's no real answer I can give except that it must be hard. I don't find it that hard, but then, I'm not sure I could write fiction that's not comedy. Also, I think that the demand for funny material is so great in movies and TV that people who can write funny stuff end up going in those fields rather than working in book form.

GR: What are you working on next?

CM: I'm currently working on my third vampire comedy, Bite Me, but I'll be doing a book about painters in the 19th century after that. I've already started the research.

GR: Vampire fiction is experiencing another revival, so I have to ask, has the author of Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck: A Love Story read Stephenie Meyer's Twilight? If so, what do you think? Why are we so crazy about vampires?

CM: I picked up the first Twilight book about three weeks ago, actually. I think she's a fine writer. I don't think I'm the target audience, but if I were a 13-year old girl, I suspect I'd be completely berserk over the Twilight series. As I said, I'm working on my own vampire book, and you can't ignore something that has phenomenal success in your field, if only so you don't end up covering material that another writer just covered. That said, the field of vampire fiction, particularly female protagonist vampire fiction, including supernatural romance, is so huge now that I couldn't keep up with it if I wanted to.

Why are we fascinated with vampires? Because they're scary, sexy, cool. All at once. That's a lot of emotion wrapped around one monster. I mean, zombies are scary, but no one wants to shag them. The Frankenstein monster is scary (and smart, in the book), but no one wants to be him. Werewolves are powerful, but no one at the party says, "Hey, who's that mysterious guy in the tux over there, with the tail, eating the crunchies out of the cat box?" See what I mean? Scary, sexy, cool.

GR: Describe a typical day spent writing. Do you have any unusual writing habits?

CM: I typically get up, have coffee with my girlfriend while we watch the news or read the news on our laptops. Then I go to work. I tend to work for three, maybe four hours. Then take a break, work out, do business stuff, go to the store, then in the evening I'll plan what I'm going to write the next day. If I'm behind on a deadline, my typical day consists of getting up, writing, or worrying about not writing, until bedtime.

GR: What authors, books, or ideas have influenced your writing style?

CM: Certainly and most prominently, John Steinbeck; his comic novels, like Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. He has a wonderfully forgiving voice toward his characters and the flaws we all share as human beings, and I've always admired and aspired to that. Certainly Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen were all inspirational in different ways, but alike in that they were writing funny books and getting away with it. They were proving it could be done.

GR: What are you reading now? What are some of your favorite books and authors?

CM: Right now I'm reading a book called The Flaneur by Edmund White, which is basically about the art of walking around Paris looking at stuff. (Evidently I have been doing it all wrong.) I'm reading a lot of research books right now, too, which isn't so interesting, so I won't share. My faves: Steinbeck; John Hersey's A Bell For Adano; The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki; Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Dracula by Bram Stoker.