Christopher Moore, author of such comic horror novels as Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel and Island of the Sequined Love Nun — best book title ever — engaged in grueling research before writing You Suck: A Love Story (Morrow, $21.95). He watched seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and five seasons of Angel on DVD.

OK, the task wasn’t that grueling.

’’You have to make sure you’re not replicating what other people are doing,’’ Moore, who appears Monday at Books & Books in Coral Gables, says from a Los Angeles hotel. ``Joss Whedon is a really good writer, and I had to see what he’d done. I changed a few things in You Suck, because some things had already happened on Buffy.’’

You Suck is the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends, which follows the adventures of Jody, a San Franciscan unceremoniously turned into a vampire, and her minion Tommy, of Incontinence, Ind. Now, Tommy’s undead, too — and unhappy about it. (Hence the book’s title.) Also back are the whacked-out Animals, Tommy’s turkey-bowling co-workers from the Safeway night shift, now in the company of a blue hooker from Vegas, a former Cheddar princess from Fond du Lac catering to Smurf freaks. Best of all, Moore introduces the hilarious Abby Normal (day-slave name Allison), a Goth teen a little too eager to enslave herself to her Dark Lords: ``So, like first thing, I made some toast, and it burned, as black as my soul, and I was so bummed that my tears of despair fell like cold bits of crystal, to be destroyed on the unforgiving rocks of this miserable life. But then I saw that Mom had left a twenty out on the counter. . . . ’’

Moore read blogs on vampirefreaks.com, a site for Goth teens, to make Abby’s voice authentic. ’’I felt like a creepy perv,’’ he admits, but he likes the vibe. ``It’s a very entertaining subculture. Back in the ’90s I was sitting at a cafe watching these fierce punk Goths, and people were walking around them and staying away from them, and as soon as the citizens were gone the punks were playing MacGyver in the parking lot.’’

Moore, now working on — of all things — a historical novel set in medieval England, may write like he’s taken one too many hits of nitrous oxide or possibly a substance likely to dissolve his central nervous system, but he talks way more normally than you’d expect for someone who so creatively stretches the parameters of vampire lore (foreskins grow back after death, and undead breasts reject implants). Oddly, he didn’t start out as a comic writer.

’’When I originally took stories to a writer’s conference in ’83 I thought they were horror stories,’’ he says. ``But everybody laughed at them in workshops. It was an accident I started writing comedy, but it’s so satisfying.’’

Q: Why did it take 10 years for you to publish You Suck?

A: I’d always planned on doing a sequel, but the original publisher dropped the ball on the first book so badly so it took 10 years for my career to recover. My previous publisher had underprinted it and put an ugly cover on it, and my book tour was one store in San Francisco on a Thursday night during the height of Seinfeld. So there was me and a drunk guy there. You can’t do a sequel to a book that didn’t do that well.

Q: You Suck is dedicated to your readers. Were they clamoring for a sequel?

A: Yes. I may be the only author who writes by request. People kept asking for the fruit bat from Sequined Love Nun to come back, but it wasn’t easy to get him to Pine Cove, Calif., for The Stupidest Angel, because, you know, he’s a Micronesian fruit bat. But everybody asked! Now everybody wants a sequel to Lamb [narrated by Jesus Christ’s childhood friend Biff], but I don’t want to be responsible for changing the religion of a third of the world.

Q: You wrote about death in your last book, A Dirty Job. Is there any topic off limits to a comic writer?

A: Not by subject matter, only in that I try not to be mean spirited. That’s off limits with the exception of the Bush administration. Karmically, they don’t get that break. . . . I have the attention span of a gnat. If I’m not interested in a subject, I’m not going to go down that road. My agent says, suburban wife swapping! But I don’t care about that upscale decadence thing.

Q: What makes you laugh?

A: I think Ricky Gervais is hilarious, but sometimes his stuff is impossible to watch, it’s so excruciating. I think Eddie Izzard is brilliant. There’s a comedian named Jake Johansson that I see in San Francisco. He’s great. I watch The Daily Show. It’s a religion with me.

Q. You are famously a huge fan of John Steinbeck. What would he say about You Suck?

A: I don’t know. He’d probably think it was shallow and not worthy and not worth looking at. It probably is shallow, but I think you should look at it. He’d like the voice, maybe. I try to be forgiving to my characters, the way he was. . . . But if I thought Steinbeck was going to read my work I’d be paralyzed.