A Dirty Job: A Novel | Christopher Moore

A Dirty Job: A Novel | Christopher Moore | Death is a Beta Male

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A Dirty Job: A Novel

	A Dirty Job: A Novel Christopher Moore HarperCollins, 2007 - 405 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Book!

If you are a C. Moore fan you will love this book. I have read them all and this is my favorite by far. If you have never read him, this might not be the book to start with as it is full of crazy characters and talking squirel people. Dark humor that is laugh out loud funny. You gotta love a book where the grim reaper complains about dropping his toast butter side down.

Death is a Beta Male

A Dirty Job isn't your typical story about Death (the Grim Reaper). It takes the concept of death and puts a new spin on it. Charlie has been chosen, unwillingly, to carry out his duties as a Death Merchant, someone who collects souls and then passes them on to their future destination. These souls are contained in possessions of the deceased after they die. If you think that sounds weird, it only gets weirder.

This is the first Christopher Moore book I've read. I was actually searching for The Stuppidest Angel which was reccommended to me but came across this instead. What I admire about Moore is his ability to write some genuinely emotinal scenes that will have your heartbreaking for his fictional characters and by the next page have you laughing again. His sense of humor is very sarcastic and twisted which is perfect for the tone of the subject matter.

Although there are a few surprises, it isn't completely unpredictable, but the ending is quite satisfying tying up loose ends quickly. The cast of supporting characters are all pretty good for the most part but it's the main protagonist that stands out with his thoughts on being a Beta Male and his warped sense of reality. The villains manage to be quite interesting as well, but I won't ruin it.

The subject did remind me of other mediums that tackled the same issue such as the Showtime series "Dead Like Me" and even to a slight extent "Grim Fandango" a Lucasarts adventure game, but A Dirty Job is different enough that it stands on its own. I can't say if you enjoyed Moore's books before that you'll love this one, but I will be checking out his other work after this.

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Moore's best book to date. "Kitty!"

This was either the fifth or sixth book I've read by Moore and it's the first one where the story and plot takes precedence over the jokes. For once his characters are three dimensional and not merely smart mouthed, annoying, eccentric joke machines. To be sure all these traditional Moore qualities are here, but they are toned down in a way that makes the whole story seem more real and enjoyable.

In this story, a man named Charlie Asher, owner of a secondhand store, becomes a "death merchant" after his wife dies shortly after childbirth, forcing him to raise his daughter Sophie alone while adjusting to his strange new job, which is retrieving "soul vessels", (normal everyday objects housing a soul) from people who are dying without a soul and need one to reach the afterlife. Charlie meets a death merchant named Minty Fresh and is helped by a goth girl named Lilly. (She acts like Abby in You Suck. Unlike her however, Lilly plays a minor role in the story and never interferes with it, functioning merely as comic relief)

Charlie soon realizes that dark forces are rising up from the underworld and are coming after both him and his daughter, ultimately set on ruling the world.

Despite all its good qualities, this book still has the flaws typically found in Moore's other books, keeping me from giving it a full five stars. For one , it slows down about ¾ of the way through because Moore includes too many characters, many of which come from his previous books. For some inexplicable reason he insists on including minor characters from previous novels in almost all his work and devotes to much attention to them, diverting away from the book's main plot. (If this is your first Moore book you won't recognize these "cameos", but if you've read more than one of them you'll probably groan as soon as they show up and say "Okay Chris I remember character X from your other book. How clever. Now why are they in this story?") Second, he has Charlie grieving for his wife almost the whole book and then suddenly he meets a woman who he instantly falls in love with, pushing the memory of his wife to the sidelines and making her seem like an after thought by the end of the book. Still, I'm willing to overlook this somewhat because Moore gives her a colorful history and she functions in the overall plot.

Finally, the ending feels rushed and may leave you feeing ripped off. This isn't a new thing with Moore. For some reason he seems to think people won't notice a bad ending in one of his books if they laughed all the way through it. Still, this ending isn't bad like his other books, nor great. It's just satisfactory. He devotes only one chapter to the "final battle" scene after hinting at it the whole book. Another 20-30 pages could've been written to tie up the fates of the characters more clearly, but after I was done reading it I thought it was well worth my time and effort.

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Typically fun Moore

If you like Christopher Moore, you'll enjoy this book. If you haven't read any of his books, you might not want to start with this one. While it stands alone, you'll enjoy it more if you've read "Bloodsucking Fiends," and then "You Suck" first.

Of course, it's no where near as good as"'Lamb," but none of his other books are. Think of Moore as Tom Robbins lite. And enjoy!

very funny

When you read Christopher Moore you expect to laugh out loud several times. 'Dirty Job' wont let you down in that department. However... beyond the humor and the interesting characters, as with all the Moore books I have read, the story itself was just a little too silly for me.

When I think of A Dirty Job, I think of several other authors. Foremost is Carl Hiaasen who writes delirious mystery books. In many ways, Moore takes a lot from Hiaasen who has been around for a while writing his own particular style and take off of Elmore Leonard. However, there is another writer that I kept thinking of, Alice Hoffman and her great book 'Practical Magic'. Though not as wacky as Moore, Hoffman pulls together a story that straddles the same boundaries and in my mind succeeds in ways well beyond 'A Dirty Job'.

There are enough reviews here that I don't feel a great need to get into the description of the story itself. What more do you need to know other than that the protagonist here is a guy who one day finds that he is death, or one of many deaths. Let me just say that this book is well worth reading and if you haven't read Hoffman or Hiaasen and enjoyed 'A Dirty Job', I think you would enjoy those writers also.

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