A DIRTY JOB
Review by Al Kaufman
William Morrow Press
Hardcover; 400 Pages
Imagine Death; not small “d” death but the capital “D.” Kind of a menacing figure, huh? Well, in the wonderfully twisted mind of Christopher Moore, Death is a rather wimpy second-hand store owner and beta male named Charlie Asher, who didn’t even realize he had the job to begin with.
So goes the story of A DIRTY JOB, Moore’s seventh comic-horror novel, and ninth overall. Charlie spends the rest of the novel collecting souls from people just before or after they die. Their souls glow red to Charlie, and are usually in something they love. For his wife, it was in a Sarah McLaughlan CD; for another woman, it was in her breast implants. Charlie’s job is to make sure the souls find other bodies to enter, and to keep the souls from the sexy forces of darkness, who, of course, reside in 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.
While this may sound heady, Moore keeps the jokes coming, whether they be tawdry, slapstick, or intellectual. Although his humor is often dark, it is never mean-spirited. It is what separates from many other comedy writers. He doesn’t feel like he’s above his characters. His characters have, well, soul. You can’t help but like them. It’s the reason why Moore’s opus, LAMB: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO BIFF, CHRIST’S CHILDHOOD PAL, was never protested by any religious groups. Although Moore finds the humor and absurdity in major issues, he also works his ass off trying to understand them (He spent three years researching LAMB.). A scene from A DIRTY JOB in which Charlie walks down the street and realizes how many people have no soul at all forces the reader to question life as much as death. And Moore does it without ever raising the reader’s blood glucose levels.
There are problems with A DIRTY JOB. While the entire premise is out there to begin with, the forces of evil are so woefully incompetent in their attempts to thwart Charlie that they cease to be scary. And every single character in the book; be it Charlie, his high-school Goth employee, his retired cop employee, other death merchants, or even his baby daughter, all have the exact same sarcastic humor. Every character speaks in Moore’s voice.
But people read Moore to do two things; think and laugh. A DIRTY JOB offers the opportunity to do plenty of both.
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