Product Description
Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He’s what’s known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant — you know, the one who’s always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male.
But Charlie’s been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He’s married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child.
Yes, Charlie’s doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie — exhausted from the birth — turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel’s hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird. . . .
People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It’s a dirty job. But hey, somebody’s gotta do it.
Christopher Moore, the man whose Lamb served up Jesus’ “missing years” (with the funny parts left in), and whose Fluke found the deep humor in whale researchers’ lives, now shines his comic light on the undiscovered country we all eventually explore — death and dying — and the results are hilarious, heartwarming, and a hell of a lot of fun.
Steven R. McEvoy @ 8:43 pm
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.
bensmomma @ 10:46 pm
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.
Gypsi Phillips Bates @ 1:35 am
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!
Lisa Murray @ 2:24 am
How could a book about death be both wildly funny and deeply compassionate? Well, because Chris Moore is the writer. Called one of the country’s best satiric writers, Moore has a talent for at once presenting a serious subject (death, Christ) with excellent research and a unique approach, being deeply respectful, and then throwing in a zinger or 20. One page will leave you pondering big questions and the next will have the beverage you just sipped come out your nose as you laugh out loud.
In A Dirty Job there are assorted characters – Charlie, of course; his daughter Sophie, fellow death merchant Minty Fresh, and some really creepy bad things who live in the storm drains of San Francisco. Oh, and the two hell hounds. That’s all I am going to tell you. Buy it, read it. If you share it with anyone else they will keep it, so plan ahead and buy a few copies up front.
Douglas S. Wood @ 4:34 am
In `A Dirty Job’ author Christopher Moore creates a wildly imaginative, often hilarious world of Death that somehow manages to be poignant at the same time. How does he do that?? I don’t know, but it’s a lot of fun, a great read, and yet touches the human spirit.
Moore’s protagonist Charlie Asher, a mild-mannered recently widowed dealer in used goods is unsettled to discover that he has somehow become a Death Merchant. He has to track down people who have just died or are about to die and collect their soul vessel so it can be passed on to somebody else who really needs it. Simple enough, or so it seems until the Morrigan show up. The Morrigan are large black bird-like creatures who live in the storm sewers of San Francisco. They are at odds with Asher and his colleagues. And then some of the people who are supposed to die don’t. Lack of death causes a Death Merchant a lot of trouble. It turns out that the lack of death is no accident, but is the result of a third-party intervention that involves really strange creatures made up of parts of dead animals sewn together and wearing nightgowns.
So, how does all that rollicking weirdness get poignant? Well, underneath all the weirdness, his book really is about Death, the death of spouses and mothers and lovers and how we deal with it.
Moore’s Note and Acknowledgement explain his inspiration for some of his ideas, including the dead animals in dresses. Check out art by Monique Motil. It can be found on the web and it’s, uhh interesting.
A Dirty Job is a lot of fun, a quick read, that’s sure to brighten your day (hey, you’re not dead yet, are you?).