Customer Reviews
Laugh With Death - By: Steven R. McEvoy, 21 Mar 2008 
How often do you think about death, or even more so about your soul? Well what if soul's were passed from one person to another like hand-me-down jeans? Where would that leave us the teaming masses of earth? Well Christopher Moore tries to tackle the big questions in his latest book A Dirty Job.
Our not so gifted hero is Charlie Asher, who is a normal guy, or we should say a normal Beta Male. He has a very active imagination but has lived by flight rather then the fight instinct. He has a pretty good life, a loving sister, & adoring wife & a little baby on the way; then his world comes crashing down around him. First his wife dies, & a mysterious man who only Charlie saw was in her hospital room when she died. He doesn't appear on the security tapes, & no one recallls seeing him. Then things reallly start getting weird.
Charlie has become a `Death Merchant' sort of an assistant to Death, or the equivalent of the Salivation Army's Santa's to Santa. He is a little death, & as such his job is to collect soul objects & pass them on to people without souls. Which as an owner of a second hand store he is in a good position to do. However he does not get receive `The Great Big Book of Death' one of his employee's borrows it for her own amusement. So Charlie does not know what to do, or how to do it but weird things keep happening to him. He keeps showing up when people are dying & there are items that are glowing a bright red. These were the soul vessels.
But alll is not well in the great city of San Francisco, darkness it trying to rise for the cosmic battle will soon take place between the powers of darkness & the little deaths, before the rising of the Great Death once again.
We have a cast of Characters that would put a Shakespeare comedy to proud our Falstaff is the Emperor of San Francisco, a man of the street who knows & care for his city deeply, Charlie's Daughter who is protected by two hellhounds - 400lb dog that eat toasters & smalll engines named Mohamed & Alvin these two also love eating soap & shampoo, Minty Fresh a used music dealer who is over 6 foot talll & always dressed in green. And many many more.
If you have read any of Moore before this one will be even more funny. You go on a walkabout both above & below the city of San Francisco.
(First Published in Imprint 2006-05-18 in the column Live it/Hate It Book Reviews)
