A man named Travis summons up a demon when he's 19 and is unable to send it back to where it came from. As a consequence
he hasn't aged a day since 1919. Catch, the demon, can't be banished because Travis lost the incantations and Travis has to deal with all the problems that demonkeeping entails. In the present day, a
Djinn is trying to get ahold of Catch, which causes even more problems on top of Travis' current ones.
The first published novel written by
Comic Literature writer
Christopher Moore
This novel provides examples of:
- The Alleged Car: Travis' Impala. A large part of the car's utter shittiness is due to Travis himself. He literally drives it into a ditch just to annoy Catch.
- And I Must Scream: Catch is punished by being chained to a rock and having an eagle fly down and eat his liver every day. Brine lampshades the fact that it sounds a lot like Prometheus' punishment. Gian Hen Gian Hand Waves this by saying that the"" Greeks were thieves, no better than Solomon"".
- Asshole Victim: Catch can't always be stopped from eating people, so Travis naturally tries to get him to eat pimps and drug dealers rather than say, babies and sweet old ladies.
- Crossover Cosmology: Gian Hen Gian, the Djinn, has a backstory that includes aspects from Greek, Arabian and Christian mythology.
- Curse of The Ancients: "By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man!"
- Decoy Protagonist: The first chapter is told from the viewpoint of a man called The Breeze. Then Catch eats him.
- Epigraph: There's one at the beginning of the novel quoting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
- Fallen Angel: Demons were formerly angels, this includes Catch.
- Fish Out of Temporal Water: Catch and Gian Hen Gian. Gian believed that he was seeing an actual genie the first time he is exposed to a movie.
- For the Evulz: Catch.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: The book is notorious for its rather convoluted plot.
- Genie in a Bottle: Gian Hen Gian was trapped in Solomon's jar for centuries before being fished out of the sea.
- He Who Must Not Be Named: Speaking Travis' name has no actual consequences, but those who he's associated with tend to call him the dark one.
- Humans Are Flawed: Humans are implied to have been created to piss off Satan and the other fallen angels... by the sheer inferiority and absurdity.
- Invisible to Normals: Catch, under most circumstances.
- It Gets Easier: Travis hates that Catch has to continually eat people, but he gets used to it.
- Kid with the Leash: Travis.
- Jerkass God: Most of the things that God does are for the sole purpose of pissing off various people.
- MacGuffin: The Seal of Solomon.
- Make it Look Like an Accident: Catch got away with killing a lot of Solomon's slaves by dropping heavy things on them and pretending it was an accident.
- The Masquerade: Catch purposefully does things that might expose The Masquerade so that he would be allowed to kill the witnesses.
- Never Learned To Read: Catch
- Our Demons Are Different: Demons are all FallenAngels. Catch, in particular, is short and squat, has scaly skin, cat eyes, and a forked tongue. He is practically indestructible can be affected by drugs but not poison and needs to eat people every couple of days or he gets cranky. When eating he triples in size and stops being Invisible to Normals. Catch also comes with the perk of granting eternal youth.
- Our Genies Are Different: Gian Hen Gian ppears as an Arabic man that can only speak Arabic, but is understood by everyone regardless of whether they know Arabic or not. He claims that Djinn are the first people, that they were RealityWarpers whose powers made God jealous. They live in the netherworld.
- Really 700 Years Old: Travis is almost a hundred years old, but he looks like he's 19. He hasn't aged a day since he summoned Catch.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Howard Phillips.
- Shout Out: Catch is quite fond of making references to pop culture. In fact in his very first scene Catch says "Your mother sucks cocks in hell" over and over while spinning his head around several times.
- The Slacker: Catch, before he began to spend time on Earth.
- Summoning Ritual
- Super Strength: Catch.
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