When Bess Leander is found hanging from a peg (designed to store Shaker chairs) in the immaculate dining room of her feminine 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”) home, it sends shock waves through the small Californian community of Pine Grove. Aside from her husband and two daughters, nobody’s more affected than Valerie Riordan, the town’s only clinical psychologist. Valerie had prescribed Zoloft for Bess. In fact, over the past couple of years she’s prescribed anti-depressants for almost all her patients. Writing a script is far easier than therapy, but anti-depressants are associated with suicidality, and Val’s sure the Zoloft underlay Bess’s suicide. So Val decides to substitute placebos for the townsfolk.
Business has slowed at the town’s pub the Head of the Slug, over the last few years - so much so that proprietor Mavis Sand decides to hire a blues man. Catfish plays a mean slide guitar that draws people near. People, and an ancient sea beast roused by a low-level nuclear leak. And that’s when things get weird.
Doing The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove justice is not easy – a complicated intertwining of plots (involving the former cult heroine of a post-apocalyptic TV series, a permanently stoned constable, a widowed retiree and artist, a corrupt sheriff, a pair of religious housewives, an IT nerd working for the police, and a pharmacist with fantasies about sex with marine mammals – but not males, he’s no pervert) come together in a satisfying whole. In the process Moore addresses the nature of the blues, religion, constructs of mental illness, and addiction, among others. And throughout there’s incidental humour (Val reads Pusher: the American Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacological Practice) and sections of delight – I particularly like the sequence where housewives Marge and Katie (from the Coalition for a Moral Society) come to former warrior babe Molly’s trailer on a quest to get signatures for their petition to reintroduce prayer in schools, which is sadly too long to include here but is in chapter 12 if you’re interested.
This is the novel I was hoping for when I read the disappointing Island of the Sequined Love Nun – more like Bloodsucking Fiends in tone, it has (as I’d hoped) reinvigorated my interest in Moore. If you like twisted, irreverent, funny novels that skirt the boundaries of disbelief, this is for you. And, if you’re offended by anti-religious sentiment, bestiality and irony, best give it a miss. - Alex
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