It’s A Dirty Job…

What if you were Death? No, seriously, take a moment to think about it. What if you were Death. THE Death. Better yet, what if you were a Death Merchant? Not sure what that is? That’s okay, I’ll explain (well, Christopher Moore will explain, but I’ll paraphrase).

In the novel, A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore, Charlie Asher is a beta male (aka the opposite of an alpha male), the owner of a second hand store in San Francisco and now a single father working a second job as a Death Merchant. Charlie receives this new job position when he unexpectedly witnesses an “impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit” standing over his dying wife as she gives birth to their daughter (mind you, of course, no one else saw this man, and there was no video record of him either). Following the strange encounter Charlie begins to see things.

Sitting in his San Francisco shop full of “previously owned goods” Charlie begins to see things glowing. Strangers start to drop dead before him (and as they do man-sized ravens appear out of nowhere and start attacking him). After a while of these strange occurrences, Charlie can’t help but to feel that something weird must be going on (but, honestly, Charlie isn’t the smartest or the most outgoing person, so he isn’t apt to figure anything out on his own).

Then, along comes Minty Fresh to enlighten and help guide Charlie (Minty Fresh being the “impossibly tall black man” from the hospital, of course). Using the knowledge he has gained from his time as a Death Merchant, as well as an amazingly illustrated pop-up book called The Great Big Book of Death, Minty informs Charlie that all the glowing items he is seeing are “soul vessels.” Minty tells him that it is their job to collect these tangible objects of the recently departed and keep them safe from the sewer-dwelling harpies (the ravens mentioned above). Taking this knowledge seriously is difficult for Charlie, and it takes a lot of time (about half the book), but once he gets it, he starts doing things right, for once. He collects soul vessels, defends himself and his colleagues from the underworld, and continues to learn more and more about himself, all while raising his daughter in San Fransico (not an easy feat, by any means).

And if this description alone is not enough to make you want to read the book, then it should also be known that it is overall, an awesomely written book. The language is smart and funny, but still understandable by any intelligence level. Upon reading this book, I was (legitimately) laughing out loud within the first chapter, and when I told this to a friend as I recommended it to them, they did not believe me, but (and I SWEAR by this) she was also laughing within reading only the first five pages. Remember being a kid and reading books where you couldn’t put them down, because you just wanted to know what was going to happen next? Well this is EXACTLY one of those kind of books. So go. Go out and buy it, or get it from a library, or borrow it from a friend, or sit for a few hours and read it in a bookstore; it doesn’t matter what you do, just go and read it!