• Paperback: 243 pages
• Christopher Moore’s Website
• List Price: $13.95 US/ $17.50 CDN
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060735422
• ISBN-13: 978-0060735425

Buy Practical Demonkeeping at:

• Chapters/Indigo
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In Christopher Moore’s ingenious debut novel, we meet one of the most memorably mismatched pairs in the annals of literature. The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and “roads” scholar Travis O’Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor façade of Pine Cove, California, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way of ridding himself of his toothy traveling companion. The winos, neo-pagans, and deadbeat Lotharios of Pine Cove, meanwhile, have other ideas. And none of them is quite prepared when all hell breaks loose.

If you haven’t read a Christopher Moore novel, you are truly missing out on one of the funniest authors out there. In his debut novel, Practical Demonkeeping we meet Travis who accidently summoned a demon named Catch. For years, many of them, Travis has been trying to send Catch back to hell but hasn’t been very successful. Catch has a horrible problem, he eats humans who don’t see him until he’s about to eat them. Travis has been searching for the one thing he thinks will send Catch back, something he gave someone who may or may not live in Pine Cove. Hopefully they do, or Travis is stuck with Catch for eternity, since you can’t kill a demon & a demon summoner is immortal until the demon is sent back to Hell.

You know it’s going to be one hell of a book when you start laughing hysterically in the first 20 pages! I am a huge Christopher Moore fan, but hadn’t read a few of his earlier novels so when I saw them in my TBR Pile after reading some pretty heavy books, I knew I had to crack one open. I was not disappointed, no author can make me cackle like Christopher Moore. He’s witty & a diabolical genius! 

There’s a line in the first few pages that literally had me rolling. When Travis & Catch roll into Pine Cove, the animals sense something supernatural is in the air (you know elephants warn of Tsunami’s, etc?) well the animals weren’t the only ones that supernatural stuff happened to. A bunch of senior citizens (men) gather in the Bait Shop to talk about all the dogs barking the night before, old George tells another story of the evening:

“Woke up with a hard-on for the first time in twenty years. It got me right up. I thought I’d rolled over on the flashlight I keep by the bed for midnight emergencies.”

“How were the batteries, Georgie?” someone interjected

“I tried to wake up the wife. Whacked her on the leg with it just to get her attention…….”

See what I mean? And that’s only page 18, the story gets funnier and funnier. With an addition of the King of Dinjin’s, who has been tracking Catch for years, a senior citizen who’s the “Chosen One” and an alcoholic you have got one of the strangest yet funniest cast of characters out there. If you are looking for a book that very well may make you tinkle yourself, pick up Practical Demonkeeping.