A Dirty Job
Christopher Moore
William Morrow
Reviewed by Sarra Borne
Christopher Moore is
a wildly
popular cult author with eight best-selling books to his name.
Populated with the usual oddball characters,
sticky situations and hilarious prose which may garner the reader
indignant
looks when they laugh out loud in
public places, A Dirty Job most assuredly will be the ninth.
Protagonist Charlie Asher is the
quintessential beta-male, mild mannered and unassuming with a slight touch
of hypochondria. He goes
about his daily business as the owner of a thrift shop who tries not to
make waves in life. On the
life-altering day when his daughter is born, he returns to his wife’s
hospital
room only to discover a seven-foot tall
Black man, wearing a mint-green suit standing over her bed. When the
heart monitors start wailing, the
mint-green man disappears without a trace. As the days go by, trying to
recover
from his wife’s death, Charlie
starts noticing certain small items in the shop have a bright red glow
and he discovers names and numbers on a
pad by his bed that he doesn’t remember writing. Charlie catches
up with Minty Fresh, the man in
green, and finds out that he has been chosen to be a Death assistant or
Death Merchant -- as Minty likes to
style himself. Not as bad as it sounds, but not a barrel of monkeys
either, Death Merchants help souls travel
from person to person in their endless ascendances towards
perfection.
Muddling through his
first few
weeks, Charlie deals admirably well with being assaulted by
oversexed
female demons, coping when
dish-soap eating hellhounds show up to protect his daughter, handling a
morose goth employee who steals
The Great Big Book of Death: An Instruction Manual, and a police
detective who invariably shows up
when he’s doing something really odd, such as talking into the
sewer. Then the proverbial hits the fan,
and Charlie finds himself faced with saving the world from the Forces
of Darkness, assisted only by a
Boston terrier, a Desert Eagle pistol and a furious army of spork
brandishing squirrel-people. It’s a dirty
job, but someone has to do it.
Somewhat over the top, Moore’s
take on death is refreshing, irreverent and comedic yet with moments
that are unexpectedly poignant and
winsome. Moore is doing what he does best, playing on the supernatural
for laughs and making even the most
ludicrous events seem possible. Faithful readers will find another
winner to add to their collections, and
new readers will be snapping up his previous offerings to get their fix.