The birth of Charlie Asher’s daughter, Sophie, was a mixed blessing, since it came with the death of his wife. He’d been up for 30 hours when it happened and ended up thinking it was just a hallucination; no one would expect to see a seven-foot-tall black man in a mint-green suit, especially since the security cameras couldn’t even see him. His fear that he was hallucinating was amplified when he began to see some items in his secondhand shop starting to glow a crimson red. Oh, and then people started to die around him—it just wasn’t Asher’s week.
Christopher Moore’s exceptional novel, A Dirty Job, follows Asher around for six years as he deals with being a Death Merchant—a name that was dubbed long before he became one. He finds out that his job is to help souls, which are being transferred through the glowing red items he collects for his shop, get from one life to the next. It takes him awhile to get into the swing of things, particularly since the sewer harpies, demons from the Underworld, keep trying to attack him and his daughter, and steal souls. Oh, and he can’t talk to other Death Merchants or the sewer harpies come out and make a lot of trouble.
A Dirty Job is a fast-paced novel jam-packed with hilarious characters, situations, wit, and absurdities. Moore manages to counter-balance the laugh-out-loud comedy with enough sorrow that the reader doesn’t take death lightly, and also adds feel-good moments to lighten up the more serious ones.
Asher, the main character, is the typical self-proclaimed Beta Male. He’s got an overactive imagination that keeps him out of trouble, but also makes him act like a complete doofus. Moore writes the character superbly, forming a cartoon of a man that almost seems real, like a caricature of the goofy kid everyone knew in high school.
In typical Moore fashion, the novel starts out weird and unbelievable, but not so absurd as to be off-putting; then, once the reader gets a false sense of security in the plot, he twists it around and makes it completely absurd, in a way only this author could. After dealing with sewer harpies, hellhounds, and clients being crushed by the number 41 bus, nothing really fazes Asher, so the twist into absurdity shouldn’t faze the reader, either.
Only a few of occurrences in A Dirty Job will confuse the reader who is new to Moore. A couple of characters are returning from previous novels, but have a proper introduction into this book since none have previously met each other. There is also slight overlap between minor characters in A Dirty Job and You Suck, the sequel to the vampire novel Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, and also one instance where the two major characters of each novel meet each other briefly. While this may be confusing, it does not detract from either novel, but adds depth to the universe Moore has created in San Francisco.
A Dirty Job has a lot more going on under the surface than meets the eye. It has more than its fair share of meaningful moments involving death. Moore uses his own experience, as well as the experiences from people he knows, in this book, with humor as a way to express the overall theme. This is a novel about dealing with death, and it is done well.
The ending is phenomenal and wraps up the novel the way it should, complete with humor, action, and grief. Some might be put off by the ending, but the epilogue makes the final chapter of the novel a little easier to bear.
Moore’s novels have begun to get a cult following, and for a good reason. His novels are fast-paced, hilarious in their absurdities and dialogue, and always just a fun read. In this humble reviewer’s opinion, A Dirty Job is the best novel he has put out, but all are definitely more than worth a read, and highly recommended. Once picked up, A Dirty Job is hard to put down.
