Christopher Moore

Cambria Author

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cmoore.JPG (13096 bytes) I was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1957. My father was a highway patrolman and my mother worked in a department store. I grew up in London and Mansfield, Ohio, and had a basic suburban childhood that comprised a lot more anxiety than actual hardship. I played football, basketball, and ran track up through ninth grade, when my father announced that if I wanted to drive when I was sixteen I had better get a job. So I got a job. A bunch of jobs.

I worked as a roofer, a night clerk in a grocery store, a factory worker making ceramic Nativity scenes (and I am still remembered for making a mean baby Jesus), an insurance man, photographer, disk jockey, journalist, motel clerk, and a waiter. All of a sudden I was thirty. I had a car, but I was thirty.

Somewhere between those jobs I went to Ohio State for a while, studying anthropology, I moved to California and studied photography at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, and I took a bunch of extension courses in writing. I also lived with a bunch of women who eventually thought it would be a better idea if I lived by myself, and I developed a pretty good drinking problem.

Then all of a sudden, I was thirty (did I already say that?). I was supposed to be famous by the time I was thirty, right? Well, I wasn't. I was a waiter at the Harmony Pasta Factory (Harmony,. CA has a population of 18, unless you count the entire metropolitan Harmony area, then it has a population of 18 and 4 cows). So I thought I better write a book. I quit drinking and started writing. A year later I finished Practical Demonkeeping, and a year after that Disney bought the film rights for the book for (as they say) a major six figure advance. Soon the book was bought by publishers in seven countries and people were asking me when the next one was due. I figured it took me 32 years to do the first one, I should have the second one done sometime around the year 2023. But all of a sudden I had readers, and my readers didn't want to wait.

During my research for Demonkeeping I kept running across trickster characters,: gods whose sole purpose seemed to be to goof on people. I wanted to bring one, the Native American god Coyote, to be specific, into the modern world.

I ended up in Montana on the Crow reservation, where I lived in a trailer with a 300 pound flatulent photographer (which is another story altogether) and a year later Coyote Blue was bought by Simon & Schuster. My editor, Michael Korda, wanted me to do a vampire book for my next project, and figuring that it had all been done, I decided to have turn the girl next door into a vampire. I had a deadline now, so long research wasn't in the formula, so I set the book in San Francisco, which is only a few hours from where I live. 18 months later I turned in the story of Tommy and Jody: Bloodsucking Fiends, a love story. Fiends was released in the fall of '95. In the meantime I spent the summer in Micronesia, on some of the outer islands of Yap (I know, it sounds like the place where they raise tiny irritating dogs, but if that's the case, it's for food, so you don't see a lot of them around on the island..)

As of now (July '96) I'm working on my new book, which is tentatively titled: Island of the Sequined Luv Nun, and is the story of a corporate pilot who crashes a jet a and loses his license, and ends up taking a job on a Pacific island flying for a missionary doctor. And, of course, there's some distinctly weird stuff going on the island.