"Christopher Moore - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Christopher)

tiny leak. Barely noticeable. A minuscule stream of harmless, low-level
radiation wafted out with the tide and drifted over the continental shelf,
dissipating as it went, until even the most sensitive instruments would have
missed it. Yet the leak did not go totally undetected.
In the deep trench off California, near a submerged volcano where the
waters ran to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds
of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a long slumber. Eyes the size of
dinner platters winked out the sediment and sleep of years. It was instinct,
sense, and memory: the Sea Beast's brain. It remembered eating the remains of
a sunken Russian nuclear submarine: beefy little sailors tenderized by the
pressure of the depths and spiced with piquant radioactive marinade. Memory
woke the beast and like a child lured from under the covers on a snowy morning
by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its great tail, broke free from the
ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the current of tasty treats. A
current that ran along the shore of Pine Cove.
 Mavis

Mavis tossed back a shot of Bushmills to take the edge off her
frustration at not being able to whack anyone with her baseball bat. She
wasn't really angry that Molly had bitten a customer. After all, he was a
tourist and rated above the mice in the walls only because he carried cash.
Maybe the fact that something had actually happened in the Slug would bring in
a little business. People would come in to hear the story, and Mavis could
stretch, speculate, and dramatize most stories into at least three drinks a
tell.
Business had been slowing over the last couple of years. People didn't
seem to want to bring their problems into a bar. Time was, on any given
afternoon, you'd have three or four guys at the bar, pouring down beers as
they poured out their hearts, so filled with self-loathing that they'd snap a
vertebra to avoid catching their own reflection in the big mirror behind the
bar. On a given evening, the stools would be full of people who whined and
growled and bitched all night long, pausing only long enough to stagger to the
bathroom or to sacrifice a quarter to the jukebox's extensive self-pity
selection. Sadness sold a lot of alcohol, and it had been in short supply
these last few years. Mavis blamed the booming economy, Val Riordan, and
vegetables in the diet for the sadness shortage, and she fought the insidious
invaders by running two-for-one happy hours with fatty meat snacks (The whole
point of happy hour was to purge happiness, wasn't it?), but all her efforts
only served to cut her profits in half. If Pine Cove could no longer produce
sadness, she would import some, so she advertised for a Blues singer.
The old Black man wore sunglasses, a leather fedora, a tattered black
wool suit that was too heavy for the weather, red suspenders over a Hawaiian
shirt that sported topless hula girls, and creaky black-on-white wing tips. He
set his guitar case on the bar and climbed onto a stool.
Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. She'd been taught as
a girl not to trust Black people.
"Name your poison," she said.
He took off his fedora, revealing a gleaming brown baldness that shone
like polished walnut. "You gots some wine?"
"Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white?" Mavis cocked a hip, gears and