A Dirty Job: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the..." (more)
Key Phrases: bobcat guy, fuck puppet, soul vessel, San Francisco, Charlie Asher, Death Merchant (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cult-hero Moore (The Stupidest Angel) tackles death—make that Death—in his latest wonderful, whacked-out yarn. For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. Though security cameras catch nothing, Charlie swears he saw an impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit standing beside Rachel as she died. When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something's up. Along comes Minty Fresh—the man in green—to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. While Charlie's employees, Lily the Goth girl and Ray the ex-cop, mind the shop, and two enormous hellhounds babysit, Charlie attends to his dangerous soul-collecting duties, building toward a showdown with Death in a Gold Rush–era ship buried beneath San Francisco's financial district. If it sounds over the top, that's because it is—but Moore's enthusiasm and skill make it convincing, and his affection for the cast of weirdos gives the book an unexpected poignancy. (Apr.)
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From The Washington Post

The tradition of Death taking on a fumbling apprentice might seem fully plumbed by now in the literature of the fantastic, on a par with all those "deal with the devil" tales. But if any contemporary humorist could be relied on to spin engaging variations on this riff, it would be Christopher Moore. Since his debut in 1992 with Practical Demonkeeping, Moore has produced eight books that deftly blend surreal, occult and even science-fiction doings with laugh-out-loud satire of contemporary culture. Powered by engines of the abnormal and unlikely, his tales feature eccentric lowlifes who find their desperate existences hilariously remade by intrusions from other spheres.

A Dirty Job is an outstanding addition to his canon. Protagonist Charlie Asher is a naturally cautious and timid soul, content with life as the proprietor of a junk shop. What sustains him is his marvelous wife, Rachel, who he can hardly believe ever consented to be his mate. And now that Rachel has delivered their first child, Sophie, Charlie's life seems complete. Of course, the birth of a daughter gives him lots of new apprehensions about mortality and the future, but in a superb example of Moore's narrative cunning, Charlie's dreads are misdirected. As the book begins, he loses not Sophie but Rachel to a "cerebral thromboembolism." Bad enough. But to complicate matters, a tall man dressed garishly in green, whom only Charlie can see, is at Rachel's side when she dies. And the fellow steals Rachel's favorite CD -- now oddly aglow with her disembodied soul -- in the confusion.

This man, Charlie learns, is a mortal named Minty Fresh, a used-music dealer who moonlights as a "Death Merchant," one of a dozen deputies for Death. Their job is to collect "soul vessels," tangible objects that house the essences of the recently departed. These soul vessels are then passed on to living individuals who lack souls of their own, in a kind of modified version of reincarnation.

And now Charlie has been tapped for the same job.

The remainder of the novel covers five years of Charlie's life, during which time he has to raise Sophie as a single dad, perform his duties as a Death Merchant and thwart a trio of sewer-dwelling harpies out to undermine all human existence. In the course of these actions, he is aided by a motley cast: his two helpers at the junk store (a teenage Goth girl and a bachelor ex-cop fixated on mail-order brides); his obnoxious lesbian sister; two hellhounds; and a mystical young leader of the "squirrel people," living puppets formed of random organic debris.

Much of the pleasure of Moore's tale resides not only in the ingeniously unpredictable events but also in the prickly vitality of his language. Striking figures of speech (the Death Merchants are "secret agents of karma") and aphorisms grace the text: "Everyone is happier, if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both." And the dialogue follows a zany illogic worthy of the Marx Brothers, as in this colloquy between Charlie and Minty Fresh:

"Mr. Fresh looked up. 'The book says if we don't do our jobs everything could go dark, become like the Underworld. I don't know what the Underworld is like, Mr. Asher, but I've caught some of the road show from there a couple of times, and I'm not interested in finding out. How 'bout you?'

" 'Maybe it's Oakland,' Charlie said.

" 'What's Oakland?'

" 'The Underworld.'

" 'Oakland is not the Underworld!' . . .

" 'The Tenderloin?' Charlie suggested."

Finally, Moore's book benefits from an instructional paradox he cannily exploits. Nothing enhances Charlie's life like death. "Until he became Death, he'd never felt so alive," writes Moore. Embracing what we fear enlarges our souls -- until they can barely fit onto a compact disc.

Reviewed by Paul Di Filippo
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition edition (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060590270
• ISBN-13: 978-0060590277
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (241 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #121,935 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Laugh out loud funny, wil make you take death lesss seriously., May 1, 2006

By	Steven R. McEvoy "MCWPP" (Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

53 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A funny and touching look at Death, February 28, 2006

By	Gypsi Phillips Bates "bilbiophile" (Knoxville, TN, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Charlie Asher is a nice, likable and (except for his exceptionally over-worked imagination, common in a "Beta Male") normal guy. At least he was normal, until the day he accidentally walked in on Death--well actually, one of his minions, the dapper and cool Minty Fresh--and finds himself as one of Death's Little Helpers as well, collecting the souls from the newly departed and saving these souls from unscrupulous use by a set of female demons and their wicked lord. Once Charlie gets the hang of it, he finds out that it's not such a bad job, makes him a decent living and gives him plenty of time with his daughter Sophie. There's just one flaw. . . it seems that the Sewer Harpies (as Charlie comes to call the female demons) are growing stronger. So strong in fact, that there will be no other course of action than a ferocious battle for the world, between the forces of good and evil.

Charlie is alternatively helped and hindered on his path by the sort of wonderful characters only Moore could create. There's Lily, the wise-cracking teenaged Goth and "creepiness child prodigy" (who quickly became my favorite), and Ray, an ex-police officer searching for love on Asian dating sites. Charlie's sister Jane -the Alpha Male that Charlie isn't- gives Charlie strength and love--all the while looking better in his suits than he does. Even Charlie's daughter Sophie, who grows up before our eyes, has some odd tendencies--bad luck with pets, one very dangerous word, her own personal hounds from hell and the typical child's memory for things that one was not supposed to hear in the first place. Of course, one couldn't expect her to be completely normal, given her father (who was convinced he saw a tail on her six-month sonogram) and the influence of her unintentional hilarious babysitters, Mrs. Korjev (and her bears) and Mrs. Ling (and her wok). Even Charlie's enemies are wonderful; I adored the Sewer Harpies with their bickering, evil ways, puppet shows and continually amusing antics. In addition, Moore throws in a few return characters from other books which was a thrill for the Moore fan. I was especially glad to see the Emperor again.

Charlie's experiences as a soul collector are both funny and touching. As is so often the case with Mr. Moore, a surprising tenderness turned up on some scenes. There is one scene in particular (the cheese scene--read it and you'll agree with me), that made me step back and say, "Wow! I need to be sure I appreciate life to the fullest!". Terminal illness, hospice care, nurses, and death all received a reverential treatment at his hands--while still being funny in that twisted Moore way.

A Dirty Job has overtaken Lamb as my favorite Christopher Moore novel and rates a full five stars. Pick it up and join Charlie the life of death. It's a dirty job, sure, but somebody's gotta do it!

48 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm a Christopher Moore junky, May 19, 2006

By	bensmomma "bensmomma" (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I tell you how much of a Moore junky I am - although I am just now in England, and thus cannot easily get a hard copy of "Dirty Job," I downloaded the audiobook for this because I just...couldn't...wait. There should be a support group for people like me, people that like to laugh uncontrollably when reading/listening in public, people who appreciate the fine art of wedding a raunchy attitude, a comic genius, a knack for REALLY fun secondary characters, and the End of the Universe As We Know It into a single novel. If you are a fellow junkie, rejoice; Moore is in top form here (I would place it up with "Lamb" and "Bloodsucking Fiends," but everyone in the group is likely to have different favorites). If you are compelled to the audiobook, the actor Fisher Stevens does a dynamite job of reading.

In "Dirty Job," Moore returns to his favorite haunt, San Francisco, with a winsome new hero, Charlie Asher. Following the death of his beloved wife Rachel after the birth of daughter Sophie, Charlie learns he has become a sort of Death Merchant, responsible for retrieving the souls of the recently departed from the material objects they most loved. However, various forces of Darkness would like to get their hands on these things, so Charlie must battle harpies demons and various other devils, while protecting Sophie from their murderous schemes.

That's about all I'm going to say about the plot. Really, I don't think it's possible to summarize a Moore plot in a public place without risk of arrest. I will only say that "Dirty Job" contains all the elements of Moore's unique type of lunacy -

(1) the perfect willingness for Guys to be Guys, sex-obsessed and confounded by women, but fundamentally good guys nevertheless.

(2) the dark and supernatural

(3) the happy realization that sex is both fun and hilarious,

(4) the deadpan secondary characters (the goth store cleck Lilly , along with the ex-cop Ray, the wacky widows who babysit Sophie),

(5) pure silliness (the manual for the Death Merchants has an opening chapter...."So Now You're Death.")

(6) less fortunately, a descent into chaos as the plot attempts to reach some conclusion. In "Dirty Job" this involves the seventh-inning appearance of little 14-inch high creatures made out of animal skulls, big hams, and chicken feet, and dressed in 18th-century costumes.

Moore is not in any sense politically correct, he is adamant about his women being sex objects, about his ethnic characters hewing to stereotype in comic fashion (the Chinese babysitter steals every sort of animal for her stewpot), etc. If that stuff offends you stay WAY the heck away from this.

And get your head examined man. Life is just too short not to laugh this hard.