May 23, 2025 by A.S. Van Dorston

Klimt, Freud and Jung meet the Bride of Frankenstein is top shelf Moore at his most intense and hilarious.

It’s been a good month for reading. I finally got through Quicksilver, the first mammoth volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy while on vacation. While he’s one of my favorite writers, particularly in the post-cyberpunk category next to William Gibson, it took me over 20 years to get around to that one, which mixes historical figures like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz with fictional characters. After some other relatively fluffy vacation reading, I was just starting Tim O’ Brien’s The Things They Carried, which has been on my to-read list since I saw him speak at my college (where he also went to) 35 years ago. I’m not chuffed to dive into a Vietnam war book, so when the latest from another favorite, Christopher Moore popped up, I immediately dove in.

“Wally rather enjoyed that Judith seemed to have only two solutions to any problem: snacks and murder.”

My absolute favorite books of his are the first two — A Dirty Job (2006) and Secondhand Souls (2015) — of what I hope will be the Reaper Trilogy. I say hope, because it’s unclear if and when he’ll do a third. I asked him about it on social media a couple years ago and he said he’s working on a new idea first. This is the new idea, which is along the lines of Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art (2012), subjecting historical figures to his “madcap satires.” Anima Rising takes place in the arctic circle in 1799, and mostly in 1911 Vienna where there is a cluster of geniuses including Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Moore cleverly inserts the Bride of Frankenstein, discovered by Klimt as a tall, naked drowned girl he pulls from the canal, who comes back to life. While she’s still feral and mostly nonverbal, he names her Judith, after his famous painting. With the assistance of his model Wally (Walburga Neuzil), they nurse Judith back to health, and with the help of some hipnosis sessions with Freud and then Jung, piece together her past and her identity, as well as the mystery between the headless man’s body found in the canal at the same time Judith was rescued, as well as shadowy figures stalking her. A giant fluffy malamute snow dog named Geoff shows up who seems to know her, and becomes her constant companion and protector, revealing that he’s also a shape-shifting demon-god from the underworld who can turn into an orca whale or a giant wolf as needed, and swallow a human in two bites. But mostly he’s just a very silly boy who loves croissants.

Judith: “Are you at peace with who you are?”

Carl Jung: “Absolutely not. Well, sometimes. No.”

“So we, you and I, are fucked.”

“That is not a cure, just another diagnosis.”

Moore cleverly keeps the biographical details and timelines of the historical characters pretty accurate, while weaving in a suspenseful mystery that is delightfully hilarious, as well as startling brutal at times. While he doesn’t whitewash the misogyny of Klimt and his protege Egon Schiele’s highly questionable sexual conduct with some of their models, Moore himself has come a long way in evolving over the years from a fairly typical post-hippie/boomer male attitude toward a more enliightened feminist viewpoint. His sensitivity toward how difficult it was to be a woman in that time is particularly reflected in Wally, who manages it all with a loving, joyfully funny personality.

Anima Rising is a comedy/satire with substance, good for belly laughs, but you also get to learn something about symbolist and expressionist art, groundbreaking work in early psychiatry, psychotherapy and analytical psychology, as well as Mary Shelley’s Frankestein turned inside out and given a much more satisfying conclusion. There’s definitely a possibility this could be a contender for one of Moore’s best. As far as my favorites, it probably makes my top six of his 19 novels. And anyone who didn’t quite click with an earlier one just might with this.

These are just my favorite Moore books, not an objective best of. The world and characters he built in Reaper particularly appeal to me and I’m dying for #3! I still need to read Sacre Bleu and the Fool trilogy.