Diana moves into a new apartment where the rent is surprisingly reasonable. What she wasn't expecting was that she would be trapped in her apartment with a ravenous — though strangely polite — horror from beyond named Vom the Hungering. While she manages to use her wits to escape, her world-view has been permanently changed by the experience. Now existing between her reality and an unfathomably infinite number of other weird things hiding in plain sight, Diana is stuck having to adjust to her new weird life, her increasing number of monstrous roommates and the encroaching end of the world. Or the end of her sanity. Whichever comes first.
Chasing the Moon is the eighth novel written by A. Lee Martinez, a Comic Fantasy novel published in 2011.
In the 2013 anthology book Robots versus Slime Monsters, one of the stories — "Pizza Madness" — is set after the events of the novel, Vom and Zap featuring as minor characters.
Chasing the Moon contains the following tropes:
- Almighty Idiot: It's implied that most monsters start out like this before finding its way into our world. Vom the Hungerer was once a cosmic apex predator of a dog-eat-dog universe before accidentally stumbling into our world, gaining the ability to speak, reason and self-control. In the case of Fenris, his more "human" self manifests as Calvin.
- Alternate History: On top of opening portals into other realities, the Apartment Complex tends to open portals into alternate timelines, though whether the apartment itself changes history of the main timeline or if they exist independently of each other is kept vague.
- In one timeline, Neanderthals survived to present day. They apparently invented the telegraph a week before Homo sapiens did.
- In another timeline, bursts of radiation turned all insect life on the planet into giant monsters. They would go on to eat all other forms of life on the Earth and they spread across the Milky Way as an invading horde. This timeline manifests whenever the Apartment's boiler breaks.
- Blessed with Suck: After Diana manages to loophole herself free from the no-win situation she finds herself in at the beginning of the book, she finds that her experience with the supernatural has left her permanently between realities. This means that she sees all of the world's weirdness for what it really is. Not only that, but she becomes a Weirdness Magnet for any Eldritch Abomination that finds itself in their reality, involuntarily collecting them as though they were Pokémon. Being between worlds also makes it so that her whims could temporarily reshape reality. Cool right? Well she has no control over it and it's implied that abusing it can result in a Fate Worse than Death.
- Cosmic Keystone: The Apartment building Diana moved into seems to act as this for Earth and other realities adjacent to it. Its landlord, West, is an Ambiguously Human man who's job is to fix all of its tiny problems (picking up packages, fixing the boiler, etc.) or else it has some existential effect on reality, from continents sinking to the ocean and the laws of physics rewriting itself, to Alternate Histories replacing the current one.
- Eldritch Abomination:
- Vom the Hungering was originally an Almighty Idiot from its own universe where it endlessly devoured before falling through the cracks into our reality. In this world, he still embodies bottomless gluttony, but now he's in a more compact form and is cursed/blessed with human intelligence and a primal form of empathy.
- Smorgaz is a hedgehog-like creature that compulsively self-replicates in the form of clones that grow out of its back, the clones no smarter than wild animals.
- Dream eaters are a race of bug-eyed Living Shadows that eat the nightmares of humans. West claims that they are a vital part of Earth's metaphysical ecosystem and that without them, the "excess goop clogging the gears" of the human psyche would build up and the human race would all have gone mad.
- Zap is a giant floating eyeball with tentacles that follows Diana around taring at her, though he insists that he's actually looking into countless other worlds that just so happen to be in her direction.
- The dog from Apartment 2 is actually a dog-like monster that guards the apartment door, and its implied that it would do something terrible if it catches anyone trying to get in or if Chuck tries to leave while it's there.
- Fenris takes the form of a monstrous second moon only visible to those in-between dimensions, chasing the other moon in the sky and releases a painful howl that can only be heard by people who are particularly sensitive to it. This reality is considered its "cage", and in the unlikely event that it does escape, the universe will collapse, making it as much a Beast of the Apocalypse as Norse Mythology described it.
- Eldritch Location: On top of being some kind of Cosmic Keystone for the universe, the apartment complex Diana moves into acts as a sort of prison for various Eldritch Abominations that find themselves in our reality and it randomly opens portals into other worlds.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: In one chapter, Diana happens upon a world described as like Paradise, only to finds herself accidentally killing thousands of its Lilliputian inhabitants after mistaking them for bugs.
- New Weird: While the novel has a lot of Cosmic Horror elements to it, the book is ultimately a Comic Fantasy that takes tropes associated with the genre — Eldritch Abominations, the Cults that worship them, Eldritch Locations, mankind's inability to cope with the true unknowable scope of the universe — and deconstructs them in a way that makes it more comically absurd than dread-inspiring.West: Just because the forces of the universe are indifferent to you doesn't make them malignant. They're not out to destroy you or drive you mad. They just don't care. Paradise exists, as your human mind defines it. In a thousand worlds, in a thousand different forms. As do ten-thousand hellish realities and everything in between.
Diana: Well that's keen. - Reality Is Out to Lunch: The world tends to look like such when a person is put in-between realities, from monsters walking around in broad daylight, to floating buildings, spontaneous portals, etc.
- Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Diana learns that constant borderline omnipotence is something you really don't want. It's pretty nifty for making a substitute moon though, and deliberately keeping it around conveniently eats up all her excess magic.
- Required Secondary Powers: Diana finds that there are fringe benefits to being the Barrier Maiden charged with keeping several Eldritch Abominations from destroying the world: namely Complete Immortality and being (almost) The Omnipotent. Unfortunately, said omnipotence causes more problems than it fixes, as it reacts to basic desires as well as conscious choices, and it often takes the path of least resistance. For example, wanting to stay home from work causes a fire to break out in her store, wanting to sell more coats leads to (accidental) Mass Hypnosis, etc.
- Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can: While Fenris' world-destroying self is trapped in the form of a second moon in the sky, its rational mind takes the form of a conspicuously human looking being named Calvin.
