The Pine Cove Trilogy: An Excercise in ’90s Whimsy

This post sums up my feelings for all of the Pine Cove trilogy novels, Practical Demonkeeping (1992), The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (1999), and The Stupidest Angel (2004). I consumed all three of these novels as audiobooks, which is, I believe, the optimal way to experience them. The actors performing the narrations are great at capturing the mood, in particular in the first two books, giving each of the many characters a unique voice, their expressiveness complimenting the snarky tone and adding to the quick pace of the novels. As for the actual contents, well…

I’d never read any of Christopher Moore’s novels before my book group chose his modern Christmas classic The Stupidest Angel for our December selection, so I was surprised to learn that it was a third of a trilogy, having never heard of either of the earlier works in the series. Being unfamiliar with Moore’s work, I’d assumed that The Stupidest Angel was his most popular novel, seeing it at bookstores all over the place when it came out back in 2004, but taking a look on Goodreads, it’s actually less read than either of the first titles in the Pine Cove Trilogy. Not knowing what to expect, but looking like some relatively quick reads, I decided to read all three, just to have a better understanding of the context of the series. In the end, this both helped me make more sense of where The Stupidest Angel was coming from, but also perhaps helped to highlight certain flaws that, for me, prevents me from recommending the series.

Sometimes, novels feel like they are better left in their own times and places. The Pine Cove series feel rooted in the cultural mores and concerns of the 1990s and offer little new or interesting to a contemporary audience except, I feel, nostalgia and a cozy yearning for more comfortable days. Well, comfortable to the white, straight, and prosperous, anyway. Each of the Pine Cove series follows basically the same formula; something weird and scary slinks into the quaint, charming fictional Central Coast California tourist community of Pine Cove (based, it seems, on the town of Cambria, which has become a favored vacation destination for my family) and the endearingly flawed locals must deal with it. Shenanigans ensue. There are definitely elements that appeal to me, with Moore’s themes of strange supernatural events occurring to otherwise normal people handled well. Each is fast-paced, written engagingly, with quirky casts of characters and absurdist situations leading to denouements in which everything is tied up nicely and cute heterosexual relationships await for our “charmingly” sad-sack white guy protagonists.

Like an Ace Ventura or a National Lampoon, though, much of the zany humor throughout the series has not aged well, to say the least. Changes in “acceptable targets” and evolutions in cultural understanding in general have given the lighthearted jokes about consent, race, gender, and mental health some much more unfortunate connotations. Everything is painted in broad brushes, in particular gender roles, race, and sexual orientation, and for better or for worse, they reflect the general cultural attitudes of the time to an extent I find distracting and difficult to overlook.

There were parts where I definitely laughed, whether at a talking Micronesian Fruit Bat or a fussy djinn. I certainly didn’t expect a Howard Phillips Lovecraft expy to be a recurring character. Had I read these in their heyday, I wonder what my takeaway would have been. Would I have noted the rather rampant use of queer people and ethnic minorities as easy punching bags for cheap jokes? I think probably not. But we live in a different cultural landscape now, one in which viewpoints other than straight white guys are presumed to exist, at least a little bit. Perhaps the jokes on the weirdness of modern life (Vegetarians exist! Have you noticed everyone’s on Prozac these days? The very concept of “El Nino”) would have been a little fresher had I not heard them hundreds of times in popular culture over the years, from A Prairie Home Companion to Sex and the City. And to me, that seems the general ambiance of each novel, frothy fun drawn from juxtaposing the weirdness of a pop-culture quoting lizard demon, a sexy sea monster, or Christmas zombies with the general idea that modern culture itself is weird, and that has lost a bit of its luster for me lately.

However, in conclusion, I could not help but think of a work in a similar vein I read, one that seemed to have some deeper things to say, though a bit darker and definitely also a product of its times, Thomas M. Disch’s Supernatural Minnesota series. The novel I read so far, The Businessman, deals in some of the same themes and tropes Moore is working with here, but goes a little deeper, into some weirder and more thought-provoking areas, one that makes it seem still relevant today in spite of its extremely early 1980s settings and themes. On that note, I also have to ask, why are Disch’s works relegated to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genres whereas Moore’s hang out in the general fiction section?