Life is beautiful if you live in a small California town with the cozy name of Fir-Needle Cove. Life is calm if you know in advance how each day and each year will end. Life is simple if you swallow handfuls of multicolored pills. But as soon as the light of retirement flickers at the end of the tunnel, some monster is sure to crawl in and run your fuel truck into—well, ruin. And that’s when it all goes to the dogs. In September, the only psychiatrist in sleepy Fir-Needle Cove decides to take her patients—half the town’s population—off antidepressants. She really wants to help people—she just forgets to tell them about it.
Meanwhile, an ancient lizard named Steve arrives in town, drawn by the fluids of longing and the piercing sounds of a blues guitar from the “Pen of the Bottom” saloon. The result of this encounter is wonderfully absurd: the modern Godzilla demolishes all the bridges of Madison County, and the reader’s head flies off from laughter. After Christopher Moore’s comedic saga “Lizard of Passion from the Cove of Sadness,” life will never seem gloomy to you again.