Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay—until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death.

It's a dirty job. But, hey! Somebody's gotta do it.

Christopher Moore is the author of twelve previous novels: Practical Demonkeeping, Coyote Blue, Bloodsucking Fiends, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Lamb, Fluke, The Stupidest Angel, A Dirty Job, You Suck, Fool, and Bite Me. He lives in San Francisco, California.

“My top pick for laugh-out-loud reading . . . dark, dark, dark and funny, funny, funny.” (Sarasota Herald-Tribune )

“Death, of course, is not usually a funny subject, but in the hands of Christopher Moore it sure is.” (Hartford Courant )

“To keep a straight face while reading this book, one would have to be dead already ... Grade: A.” (Rocky Mountain News )

“One of the antic Moore’s funniest capers yet.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“Makes you laugh in the face of death.” (Rocky Mountain News )

“[Moore] is superb in this mock epic of death and love. Smart people will be enormously amused.” (Library Journal (starred review) )

“Dizzyingly inventive and hypnotically engaging, A DIRTY JOB is . . . like no other book I’ve ever read.” (Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Son of a Witch )

“Outlandishly funny.” (Syracuse Post-Standard )

“Hilarious yet poignant.” (Hartford Courant )

“Outstanding . . . The dialogue follows a zany illogic worthy of the Marx brothers.” (Washington Post Book World )

“A bravura mix of the familiar and the hilariously original.” (Denver Post )

“[Moore’s] most speculative, tripped-out and deeply felt book to date.” (The Oregonian (Portland) )

“Moore’s signature tossed-off humor is in full effect, and it’s easy to care about his warm, lumpy, honest characters.” (Entertainment Weekly )

“[A] wonderful, whacked-out yarn.” (Publishers Weekly )

“[A DIRTY JOB] will keep a smile on your face long after you put it down.” (Cleveland Plain Dealer )

Protecting the souls of the dead from the forces of darkness is a nasty job, but someone has to do it. Fisher Stevens's narration of Moore's novel about a reluctant Grim Reaper will have listeners rolling with laughter. As the book opens, the neurotic Charlie Asher--thrift-shop owner and self-proclaimed "beta male"--is visiting his wife at the hospital, where she's just given birth to their daughter. But his world goes topsy-turvy when he finds his wife dead, with a mysterious old black man in a mint green suit standing over her. Stevens, the cynical, wisecracking Chuck Fishman in the CBS series "Early Edition," is an ideal choice as narrator. He imbues the story (without embalming it) with a whiny wit that fits Charlie's character, and he gives distinct personalities to a wide range of characters, human and otherwise. S.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Cult-hero Moore (The Stupidest Angel) tackles death—make that Death—in his latest wonderful, whacked-out yarn. For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. Though security cameras catch nothing, Charlie swears he saw an impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit standing beside Rachel as she died. When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something's up. Along comes Minty Fresh—the man in green—to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. While Charlie's employees, Lily the Goth girl and Ray the ex-cop, mind the shop, and two enormous hellhounds babysit, Charlie attends to his dangerous soul-collecting duties, building toward a showdown with Death in a Gold Rush–era ship buried beneath San Francisco's financial district. If it sounds over the top, that's because it is—but Moore's enthusiasm and skill make it convincing, and his affection for the cast of weirdos gives the book an unexpected poignancy. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Moore has been winningly adulterating horror with comedy for more than a decade, and his last novel, The Stupidest Angel (2004), drew more delighted attention than ever. Big things are anticipated for this book, which trades in Moore's usual small-town setting for glamorous San Francisco, where ridiculously apprehensive brand-new father Charlie Asher runs a secondhand shop. Charlie obsesses that little Sophie won't draw her next breath. Instead, his wife Rachel doesn't, and Charlie blames the seven-foot guy in the mint-green suit whom he intercepts in Rachel's room. Would it were that simple. Charlie eventually learns he has joined a tiny band, to which the tall intruder already belongs, whose members must collect soul vessels--objects in which the souls of the just-deceased are lodged--and keep them until their proper, necessarily soulless, next human receptacles come along. Unfortunately, four hideous demons or deities of death want the soul vessels, too, for sustenance as they prepare to conquer the world. The book unfolds as a struggle between Charlie, who thinks he's supposed to be the new big cheese of death, and the demons. The comedy's in the fine points: of character (the men are all beta males, congenitally shy of confrontation; the women, even little Sophie, brainy eccentrics), of dialogue (lotsa rude sex and fashion jokes), of physical detail (e.g., Charlie favors, of all things, an epicene sword-cane as a weapon). If not quite as funny as some of its predecessors, this showcases Moore's most distinctive gift: maintaining a breakneck pace while seemingly just numbly fumbling along. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The tradition of Death taking on a fumbling apprentice might seem fully plumbed by now in the literature of the fantastic, on a par with all those "deal with the devil" tales. But if any contemporary humorist could be relied on to spin engaging variations on this riff, it would be Christopher Moore. Since his debut in 1992 with Practical Demonkeeping, Moore has produced eight books that deftly blend surreal, occult and even science-fiction doings with laugh-out-loud satire of contemporary culture. Powered by engines of the abnormal and unlikely, his tales feature eccentric lowlifes who find their desperate existences hilariously remade by intrusions from other spheres.

A Dirty Job is an outstanding addition to his canon. Protagonist Charlie Asher is a naturally cautious and timid soul, content with life as the proprietor of a junk shop. What sustains him is his marvelous wife, Rachel, who he can hardly believe ever consented to be his mate. And now that Rachel has delivered their first child, Sophie, Charlie's life seems complete. Of course, the birth of a daughter gives him lots of new apprehensions about mortality and the future, but in a superb example of Moore's narrative cunning, Charlie's dreads are misdirected. As the book begins, he loses not Sophie but Rachel to a "cerebral thromboembolism." Bad enough. But to complicate matters, a tall man dressed garishly in green, whom only Charlie can see, is at Rachel's side when she dies. And the fellow steals Rachel's favorite CD -- now oddly aglow with her disembodied soul -- in the confusion.

This man, Charlie learns, is a mortal named Minty Fresh, a used-music dealer who moonlights as a "Death Merchant," one of a dozen deputies for Death. Their job is to collect "soul vessels," tangible objects that house the essences of the recently departed. These soul vessels are then passed on to living individuals who lack souls of their own, in a kind of modified version of reincarnation.

And now Charlie has been tapped for the same job.

The remainder of the novel covers five years of Charlie's life, during which time he has to raise Sophie as a single dad, perform his duties as a Death Merchant and thwart a trio of sewer-dwelling harpies out to undermine all human existence. In the course of these actions, he is aided by a motley cast: his two helpers at the junk store (a teenage Goth girl and a bachelor ex-cop fixated on mail-order brides); his obnoxious lesbian sister; two hellhounds; and a mystical young leader of the "squirrel people," living puppets formed of random organic debris.

Much of the pleasure of Moore's tale resides not only in the ingeniously unpredictable events but also in the prickly vitality of his language. Striking figures of speech (the Death Merchants are "secret agents of karma") and aphorisms grace the text: "Everyone is happier, if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both." And the dialogue follows a zany illogic worthy of the Marx Brothers, as in this colloquy between Charlie and Minty Fresh:

"Mr. Fresh looked up. 'The book says if we don't do our jobs everything could go dark, become like 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."

Finally, Moore's book benefits from an instructional paradox he cannily exploits. Nothing enhances Charlie's life like death. "Until he became Death, he'd never felt so alive," writes Moore. Embracing what we fear enlarges our souls -- until they can barely fit onto a compact disc.

Reviewed by Paul Di Filippo
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

It's certainly original. Even the harshest critic can't begrudge Christopher Moore his vivid imagination, satirical plots, and humor. Like a good sleight-of-hand artist, Moore builds up a huge reserve of goodwill to pull off his most demanding trick yet: laughing at death. The already-strained boundaries of his previous work (Lamb, an alternate history of Jesus's life; Bloodsucking Fiends, a vampire love story; and The Stupidest Angel, concerning the resurrection of Santa Claus) stretch even further to produce this tale that critics praise for its "improbable humor" (New York Times) and courage in "embracing what we fear" (Washington Post).<BR>Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.