Death Takes a Ferret in Go-Go Boots, or This Is One Apprentice Donald Trump Would Think Twice Before Firing
01/31/2007
Moore, Christopher. A Dirty Job. New York: William Morrow, 2006. 387 p.
Collecting the souls of the dead. It’s a dirty job, but …. Well you know the saying.
I must begin this review by admitting that I now feel a definite sense of shame because I have never checked out comic horror novelist Christopher Moore before picking up his 2007 work, A Dirty Job. To say that this is a wonderful book cannot possibly get across to readers what it is like to read a novel by Moore. All I can say is that if you, like me before I picked up A Dirty Job, have never been fortunate enough to read one of his novels before, then be prepared to expect something along the lines of … hmmm … Stephen King meets Carl Hiaasen—in a dark alley. The absurdist quality of the work squarely places Moore in the line of Kurt Vonnegut, but the story line recalls the underlying narrative tension (not to mention the horrifying subject matter) of a Stephen King novel.
The story goes something like this: Charlie Asher (a beta-male thrift store owner and resident of San Francisco) sees a figure who is invisible to everyone else in the hospital room, as his wife dies after giving birth to their little girl, Sophie. This heralds his introduction to his new part time vocation—Death Merchant (In Moore’s hands, this term is more literal than you might think, but not in the way anyone would expect). I will try to not give away too many particulars of the plot and spoil the surprises, but I will tell you that the story involves the nature of death, the mechanics of the actual process, the underworld and its myriad denizens, the crime fighting capabilities of the San Francisco police, romance (including inter-species romance), and many further insights into the true nature of the universe.
The cast of characters includes Jane, Charlie’s alpha lesbian sister; her partner; his Gothette shop-girl; her somewhat addled ex-cop counterpart; one rather wistful police detective; his somewhat less fanciful partner; and a man named Minty Green (so named because he appears in mint green clothing). The aforementioned shop girl, Charlie’s assistant (Lilly), is particularly amusing since she believes herself to be death incarnate. At one point, she tries to steal Charlie’s “Death Merchant” instruction manual, The Big Book of Death.
Like many other Moore novels, the eccentricities of the characters carry a good bit of the action. Moore here also revisits a favorite theme of his—a human forced into a supernatural role, which he reluctantly accepts and deals with as best as possible, usually with comic results. It was an idea he first introduced with Practical Demon Keeping and which he playfully examines again in Blood Sucking Fiends. While Charlie is not saddled with a rambunctious demon that eats his friends, nor does he find himself becoming one of the undead, he does have to deal with his own problem when he is forced to become an apprentice “soul stealer” for five years.
Again, it is impossible to do justice to a Christopher Moore novel in one simple review. Suffice it to say that if you want a challenging, clever, at times uproariously funny read, I urge you to break open your piggy bank and get yourself a copy of A Dirty Job. You may find yourself rummaging through your local public library’s fiction collection afterwards, looking for Moore’s older titles (and the good news is that most good libraries have his early works, as they are quite popular with readers). Better yet, you might want to dip into one of your rainy day funds and get your own copies, so that you can read them again and again. After all, there aren’t that many really good comic horror novelists out there, and Moore is easily the yardstick against which any others will be judged. In short, this is a writer who actually deserves to be paid for his work.