A Dirty JobIn the blink of an eye, Charlie Asher’s world fell apart – not that he hadn’t been expecting it. He was a worrier. After his wife died suddenly, Charlie was left with an infant daughter, a thrift store to run, and an eerie magnatism for the soon-to-be-dead. Oh, and a part-time job as a reaper, whose job duties are outlined in the manual “The Great Big Book of Death.”

I’d read Moore’s book “Fluke” before, and he has a knack for creating bizzare characters. There’s Charlie’s daughter, Sophie, who can kill with the word “kitty” and is guarded by hellhounds; his lesbian sister, Jane, who keeps stealing his suits; a goth-girl disciple and retail clerk; a 7-foot-tall fellow “Death Merchant” named Minty Fresh; a Buddhist with a talent for reanimating squirrel parts; and the Morrigan, a hostile trio of Celtic death-goddess harpies.

From Moore’s acknowledgments, it’s clear that he wrote this book while his mother was dying, and he dedicates “A Dirty Job” to hospice workers and volunteers. Hospice workers appear in several cameos, and his descriptions of families in mourning feel very authentic.

Another theme Moore is enchanted with is the idea of “Beta Males”:

While Alpha Males are often gifted with superior physical attributes – size, strength, speed, good looks – selected by evolution over the eons by the strongest surviving and, essentially, getting all the girls, the Beta Male gene has survived not by meeting and overcoming adversity, but by anticipating and avoiding it. That is, when the Alpha Males were out charging after mastadons, the Beta Males could imagine in advance that attacking what was essentially an an angry, wooly bulldozer with a pointy stick might be a losing proposition, so they hung back at camp to console the grieving widows.

Our hero Charlie Asher is most decidedly a Beta male.

So, what about this book got on my nerves? Continued and egregious use of a term I’d never heard used before (and would be hesitant about entering into a Google search engine): f*ck-puppets. The asterisk is mine, because my dead grandmas may be reading this from heaven. The more grandmother-appropriate equivalent would be “mistresses” or “kept women.” It made me all uncomfortable, and I don’t enjoy feeling like a prude, Christopher Moore!

But don’t get me wrong, I really liked this book. In fact, it won my heart the second I realized that the cover was glow-in-the-dark. I am all about the meaningless externals.

Verdict: 8 out of 10. I read it in one sitting, and laughed until my seat neighbor on the airplane started looking at me funny.

For an even better book with a similar sense of macabre whimsy, read “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. “Good Omens” would score a 9.5 on my scale. Armageddon has never been this funny.