Christopher Moore is the bestselling author of a dozen comic novels, including Lamb, a retelling of the Gospel story from the point of view of Christ’s childhood pal Biff, and Fool, which retells Shakespeare’s King Lear from the point of view of the foul-mouthed court jester Pocket. Pocket returns in Moore’s latest book The Serpent of Venice, which blends The Merchant of Venice with Othello. The opening chapter also features a scene straight out of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which we find Pocket chained to a dungeon wall. In Moore’s version though, a strange aquatic creature appears from the darkness to perform sex acts on the helpless Pocket.

“It’s as tastefully done as you can do inter-species bondage porn,” says Christopher Moore in Episode 108 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “There’s no graphic description of what’s going on. You just know that something really bizarre has gone on.”

Moore’s been capitalizing on the comic potential of monster sex for years. His 1999 novel The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove centers on the relationship between a 100-foot-long sea monster and an aging B-movie actress. Moore concedes that such hijinks may cost him a few readers, but he doesn’t care. It’s worth it to be able to write about a woman stimulating her monstrous lover with the aid of a weed-whacker.

“That was way weirder than what goes on in this book,” says Moore. “So I already lost those people a long time ago.”

Fortunately Moore finds himself in a cultural landscape increasingly receptive to monster sex. His trilogy of vampire books (Bloodsucking Fiends, You Suck, and Bite Me) were intended as straight comedies exploring the peculiarities of dating a vampire. Unexpectedly they also found a home among Romance readers, who are increasingly hungry for monster stories.

“There’s really a genre now, that I had to be told there was, of monster sex,” says Moore. “In that whole Paranormal Romance thing, there’s a whole lot of inter-monster boning going on.”

Listen to our complete interview with Christopher Moore in Episode 108 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as Bible scholars Robert M. Price and Richard Carrier join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss the recent Darren Aronofsky film Noah.

Christopher Moore on bawdiness in Shakespeare:

“Shakespeare is basically writing at a time when there are pilgrims becoming a dominant political force in England, and they’re going to be so straight-laced and so freaked out by everything that they’re going to get thrown out of the straightest, most Christian nation in the world at that point, and sent to the U.S. where they can turn into school boards in Mississippi … Shakespeare was working within a pretty strict format—his practices and standards people were tougher probably than they are at NBC—and yet he got away with a lot. There are a couple of scenes in Love’s Labour’s Lost where [Rosaline] just keeps going on about, ‘A fool needs to hit it, hit it good,’ and clearly they’re talking about spanking and bawdy, light S&M sex and so forth. It’s clear that’s what’s going on. And it’s only if you had closed your mind to that possibility at all that you would miss that as part of what Shakespeare’s having fun with.”

Christopher Moore on Shylock’s motivation:

“The characters in The Merchant of Venice are real dicks to Shylock, and that’s happening almost 300 years after my book takes place, so I wanted to give details to that. I wanted to show that even in those times the Jews were forced to wear yellow stars sewn on their clothes—this thing we think originated with the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazis didn’t. It originated in the Middle Ages. And Jews were often accused of poisoning wells. In England Jews were not allowed to own property, and so one of the reasons that you have the prefix ‘gold’ in a lot of people’s Jewish names is that they became jewelers and held gold because they couldn’t hold real estate, and they became money lenders because they couldn’t hold real estate. I didn’t know that until I did research on this, and despite that it’s a comic novel and the biggest concern is I want to entertain and make people laugh, I thought it would be interesting to them—how did Shylock become a money lender? Well, he became a money lender because he didn’t have any choice.”

From our panel on Darren Aronofsky’s Noah:

Robert M. Price on the victims of the flood:

“I mean, was every one of them bad? Were they like the orc army in Lord of the Rings? … I remember once when I was a pastor … the youth choir sang this grotesque song about the flood story, and it centered on God putting the rainbow in the sky, and the song was titled ‘Rainbow Valentine.’ I shouldn’t have said this, but I got up and said, ‘With all these people getting killed, they should have called it “Rainbow Epitaph” or something.’ Like the way the whole flood story is dealt with in this terrible book The Purpose-Driven Life … It just does not occur to [the author] that this entailed the horrible deaths of all these people, and I think most people don’t either, which to me indicates that they are reading it as a myth, even though consciously they think it’s history. The fact that as a myth you’re not really supposed to worry about all those people, they’re just ‘the bad guys.’ Period. They’re not really thinking of it as some kind of Auschwitz-like horror, which it is.”

Richard Carrier on his upcoming book On the Historicity of Jesus:

“When I was interviewed for [The God Who Wasn’t There], I wasn’t really convinced of the thesis at the time, but since then I’ve had fans support my work and I’ve done a lot of research, and I am now pretty convinced that Jesus didn’t exist, that in fact the idea of a historical Jesus walking around Galilee was a later invention … If we look at all the evidence, it really is better explained by supposing that Christianity originated with Jesus being an angelic figure that people knew only through revelations, and that this idea of making him a man walking around Galilee was something they did to allegorize their actual soteriology, their actual theory of salvation. This actually makes more sense of a lot of the odd features of the evidence that otherwise are really hard to explain on the traditional theory of how the Gospels developed, or how Christianity developed … I’m not the first one to do this. There are many people who have written about it … It just hasn’t been getting the attention that it should have gotten.”