book #22

[realthog]

There comes a time in every reader's life when they must face the fact that they're running out of Christopher Moore books to read. This doleful thought was in my mind the other week as I ran my eyes along the shelves in our local thrift shop (run by the excellent charity Save Our Sisters).

And then my eye fell on the novel Second Coming Attractions (1998) by David Prill . . . and, as it fell, so did my heart soar, for I thought unto myself that I might hereby have discovered the solution to my imminent Moore shortage. Set in the world of Xtian moviemaking, Prill's novel promises wacky adventures as family-friendly studio Good Samaritan tries to see off the commercial challenge of new anti-abortion shock studio Blood of the Lamb. Among the many complications are that the daughter of Good Samaritan's boss discovers herself pregnant by the studio's new Jesus Christ actor; and that the perfect script for Blood of the Lamb, written by the bright young editorial assistant at the magazine Christian Bus Driver, is brought instead to the folks at Good Samaritan, who cannot film it because of its subject matter but at the same time know it'd be commercial dynamite in the hands of their rivals.

Visions of enjoyably offensive jokes swimming in my mind, I paid my money and scuttled home to put the book near the top of my to-be-read pile.

Well . . .

This is not a bad book. I think my problem with Second Coming Attractions is that it seems to take a lot of very promising material and then do very little with it. I did laugh out loud three or four times, but most and perhaps all of the relevant jokes (I wasn't counting) concerned side-action at Christian Bus Driver, not the foreground events involving the two movie studios. Furthermore, while three or four guffaws is not a bad score for me with a comic novel, I didn't find I was grinning very often in the between times; indeed, the book began to feel less like light entertainment and more like hard work, to the extent that on several occasions I was very tempted to abandon it. In the end I persevered -- and that verb really sums up my experience of the novel.

A great disappointment. I should add that others obviously enjoy Prill's work far more than I do -- and decidedly non-negligible others: the back of the cover quotes a rave by Gahan Wilson about Prill's earlier novel Serial Killer Days. But for me, alas, no.

I still have at least one Moore and quite a few Hiaasens to go . . .