A Dirty Job: A Novel

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He's what's known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant -- you know, the one who's always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male. But Charlie's been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He's married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child.Yes, Charlie's doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie -- exhausted from the birth -- turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel's hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird. . . . People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It's a dirty job. But hey, somebody's gotta do it.Christopher Moore, the man whose Lamb served up Jesus' "missing years" (with the funny parts left in), and whose Fluke found the deep humor in whale researchers' lives, now shines his comic light on the undiscovered country we all eventually explore -- death and dying -- and the results are hilarious, heartwarming, and a hell of a lot of fun.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Bookmarks Magazine

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).Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist

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 OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Rocky Mountain News

“Makes you laugh in the face of death.”

Library Journal (starred review)

“[Moore] is superb in this mock epic of death and love. Smart people will be enormously amused.”

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

“My top pick for laugh-out-loud reading . . . dark, dark, dark and funny, funny, funny.”

Hartford Courant

“Hilarious yet poignant.”

Syracuse Post-Standard

“Outlandishly funny.”

Kirkus Reviews

“One of the antic Moore’s funniest capers yet.”

Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Son of a Witch

“Dizzyingly inventive and hypnotically engaging, A DIRTY JOB is . . . like no other book I’ve ever read.”

Publishers Weekly

“[A] wonderful, whacked-out yarn.”

Entertainment Weekly

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

Rocky Mountain News

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

The Oregonian (Portland)

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

Denver Post

“A bravura mix of the familiar and the hilariously original.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer

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

Washington Post Book World

“Outstanding . . . The dialogue follows a zany illogic worthy of the Marx brothers.”

Hartford Courant

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

From the Back Cover

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy. A little hapless, somewhat neurotic, sort of a hypochondriac. He's what's known as a Beta Male: the kind of fellow who makes his way through life by being careful and constant -- you know, the one who's always there to pick up the pieces when the girl gets dumped by the bigger/taller/stronger Alpha Male. But Charlie's been lucky. He owns a building in the heart of San Francisco, and runs a secondhand store with the help of a couple of loyal, if marginally insane, employees. He's married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. And she, Rachel, is about to have their first child.Yes, Charlie's doing okay for a Beta. That is, until the day his daughter, Sophie, is born. Just as Charlie -- exhausted from the birth -- turns to go home, he sees a strange man in mint-green golf wear at Rachel's hospital bedside, a man who claims that no one should be able to see him. But see him Charlie does, and from here on out, things get really weird. . . . People start dropping dead around him, giant ravens perch on his building, and it seems that everywhere he goes, a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Strange names start appearing on his nightstand notepad, and before he knows it, those people end up dead, too. Yup, it seems that Charlie Asher has been recruited for a new job, an unpleasant but utterly necessary one: Death. It's a dirty job. But hey, somebody's gotta do it.Christopher Moore, the man whose Lamb served up Jesus' "missing years" (with the funny parts left in), and whose Fluke found the deep humor in whale researchers' lives, now shines his comic light on the undiscovered country we all eventually explore -- death and dying -- and the results are hilarious, heartwarming, and a hell of a lot of fun.

From The Washington Post

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Dirty JobA NovelBy Christopher MooreHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Copyright © 2006 Christopher MooreAll right reserved.ISBN: 0060590270Chapter OneBecause I could not stop for deathhe kindly stopped for meCharlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him -- him; his wife, Rachel; and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in."She's not breathing," Charlie said."She's breathing fine," Rachel said, patting the baby's back. "Do you want to hold her?"Charlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had handed her quickly to a nurse insisting that someone more qualified than he do some finger and toe counting. He'd done it twice and kept coming up with twenty-one."They act like that's all there is to it. Like if the kid has the minimum ten fingers and ten toes it's all going to be fine. What if there are extras? Huh? Extra-credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?" (Charlie was sure he'd spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram. Umbilical indeed! He'd kept a hard copy.)"She doesn't have a tail, Mr. Asher," the nurse explained. "And it's ten and ten, we've all checked. Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.""I'll still love her, even with her extra finger.""She's perfectly normal.""Or toe.""We really do know what we're doing, Mr. Asher. She's a beautiful, healthy baby girl.""Or a tail."The nurse sighed. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of a snake up her right calf that showed through her white nurse stockings. She spent four hours of every workday massaging preemie babies, her hands threaded through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive spark in there. She talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no bigger than a balled-up pair of sweat socks. She cried over every one, and believed that her tears and touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies, which was just fine with her. She could spare it. She had been a neonatal nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new father."There's no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!" She pulled down the blanket and aimed baby Sophie's bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta Male had never seen.Charlie jumped back -- a lean and nimble thirty, he was -- then, once he realized that the baby wasn't loaded, he straightened the lapels on his tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. "You could have removed her tail in the delivery room and we'd never know." He didn't know. He'd been asked to leave the delivery room, first by the ob-gyn and finally by Rachel. ("Him or me," Rachel said. "One of us has to go.")In Rachel's room, Charlie said: "If they removed her tail, I want it. She'll want it when she gets older.""Sophie, your Papa isn't really insane. He just hasn't slept for a couple of days.""She's looking at me," Charlie said. "She's looking at me like I blew her college money at the track and now she's going to have to turn tricks to get her MBA."Rachel took his hand. "Honey, I don't think her eyes can even focus this early, and besides, she's a little young to start worrying about her turning tricks to get her MFA.""MBA," Charlie corrected. "They start very young these days. By the time I figure out how to get to the track, she could be old enough. God, your parents are going to hate me.""And that would be different how?""New reasons, that's how. Now I've made their granddaughter a shiksa.""She's not a shiksa, Charlie. We've been through this. She's my daughter, so she's as Jewish as I am."Charlie went down on one knee next to the bed and took one of Sophie's tiny hands between his fingers. "Daddy's sorry he made you a shiksa." He put his head down, buried his face in the crook where the baby met Rachel's side. Rachel traced his hairline with her fingernail, describing a tight U-turn around his narrow forehead."You need to go home and get some sleep."Charlie mumbled something into the covers. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes. "She feels warm.""She is warm. She's supposed to be. It's a mammal thing. Goes with the breast-feeding. Why are you crying?""You guys are so beautiful." He began arranging Rachel's dark hair across the pillow, brought a long lock down over Sophie's head, and started styling it into a baby hairpiece."It will be okay if she can't grow hair. There was that angry Irish singer who didn't have any hair and she was attractive. If we had her tail we could transplant plugs from that.""Charlie! Go home!""Your parents will blame me. Their bald shiksa granddaughter turning tricks and getting a business degree -- it will be all my fault."Rachel grabbed the buzzer from the blanket and held it up like it was wired to a bomb. "Charlie, if you don't go home and get some sleep right now, I swear I'll buzz the nurse and have her throw you out."She sounded stern, but she was smiling. Charlie liked looking at her smile, always had; it felt like approval and permission at the same time. Permission to be Charlie Asher."Okay, I'll go." He reached to feel her forehead. "Do you have a fever? You look tired."Continues...Excerpted from A Dirty Jobby Christopher Moore Copyright © 2006 by Christopher Moore. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

About the Author

Christopher Moore is the author of eighteen previous novels, including Razzmatazz, Shakespeare for Squirrels, Noir, Secondhand Souls, Sacré Bleu, Fool, and Lamb. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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