In Christopher Moore's ingenious debut novel, we meet one of the most memorably mismatched pairs in the annals of literature. The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and "roads" scholar Travis O'Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor façade of Pine Cove, California, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way

It's Christmastime in Pine Cove. Lena Marquez rings the bell for the Salvation Army, and when ex-husband Dale Pearson won't part with his pocket change, she decides to exact revenge. Meanwhile, while rushing home from a friend's house in the dark one night, little Joshua Barker, age seven, sees a woman kill Santa with a shovel. (But it wasn't Santa; it was Dale.) A small boy makes a simple Christmas wish: Please, Santa, come back from the dead.