A Dirty Job by: Chrstopher Moore

A Dirty Job
Christopher Moore
Harper Collins - Browse Inside
March 2006
ISBN: 0060590270


How often do you think about death, or even more so about your soul? Well what if soul’s were passed from one person to another like hand-me-down jeans? Where would that leave us the teaming masses of earth? Well Christopher Moore tries to tackle the big questions in his latest book A Dirty Job.

Our not so gifted hero is Charlie Asher, who is a normal guy, or we should say a normal Beta Male. He has a very active imagination but has lived by flight rather then the fight instinct. He has a pretty good life, a loving sister, and adoring wife and a little baby on the way; then his world comes crashing down around him. First his wife dies, and a mysterious man who only Charlie saw was in her hospital room when she died. He doesn’t appear on the security tapes, and no one recalls seeing him. Then things really start getting weird.

Charlie has become a ‘Death Merchant’ sort of an assistant to Death, or the equivalent of the Salivation Army’s Santa’s to Santa. He is a little death, and as such his job is to collect soul objects and pass them on to people without souls. Which as an owner of a second hand store he is in a good position to do. However he does not get receive ‘The Great Big Book of Death’ one of his employee’s borrows it for her own amusement. So Charlie does not know what to do, or how to do it but weird things keep happening to him. He keeps showing up when people are dying and there are items that are glowing a bright red. These were the soul vessels.

But all is not well in the great city of San Francisco, darkness it trying to rise for the cosmic battle will soon take place between the powers of darkness and the little deaths, before the rising of the Great Death once again.

We have a cast of Characters that would put a Shakespeare comedy to proud our Falstaff is the Emperor of San Francisco, a man of the street who knows and care for his city deeply, Charlie’s Daughter who is protected by two hellhounds – 400lb dog that eat toasters and small engines named Mohamed & Alvin these two also love eating soap and shampoo, Minty Fresh a used music dealer who is over 6 foot tall and always dressed in green. And many many more.

If you have read any of Moore before this one will be even more funny. You go on a walkabout both above and below the city of San Francisco.

(First Published in Imprint 2006-05-18 in the column Live it/Hate It Book Reviews)

Other Moore Books I have Reviewed:
Bloodsucking Fiends
A Dirty Job
You Suck: A Love Story