A Dirty Job: A Novel

[A Dirty Job: A Novel
by Christopher Moore - 2006, William Morrow]

Christopher Moore seems to love putting the mystical, fantastical and improbable into his novels - while at the same time providing the detail and feeling of the real world to such and extent that the reader forgets the improbabilities and sinks into the story. I would highly recommend his books to all who love satirical tales which involve the supernatural.

Charlie Asher finds himself dealing with death in a highly personal way as he tries to navigate life as a widower and father of a newborn daughter while accepting the fact that he's also been recruited to be a Death Merchant. This tale had me chuckling from the very beginning with poignant insight such as this from page 19:

Charlie hadn't really counted on killing a guy that morning. He had hoped to get some twenties for the register at the thrift store, check his balance, and maybe pick up some yellow mustard at the deli. (Charlie was not a brown mustard kind of guy. Brown mustard was the condiment equivalent of skydiving - it was okay for racecar drivers and serial killers, but for Charlie, a fine line of French's yellow was all the spice that life required) [...]

If this brief, yet masterful parable isn't enough to convince you of Moore's prowess with words and truth, here's another example - a description of a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham.

The 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham was the perfect show-off of death machines. It consisted of nearly three tons of steel stamped into a massively mawed, high-tailed beast lined with enough chrome to build a Terminator and still have parts left over - most of it in long, sharp strips that peeled off on impact and became lethal scythes to flay away pedestrian flesh. Under the four headlights it sported two chrome bumper bullets that looked like unexploded torpedoes or triple-G-cup Madonna death boobs. It had a noncollapsible steering column that would impale the driver upon any serious impact, electric windows that could pinch off a kid's head, no seat belts, and a 325 horsepower V8 with such appallingly bad fuel efficiency that you could hear it trying to slurp liquefied dinosaurs out of the ground when it passed. It had a top speed of a hundred and ten miles an hour, mushy, bargelike suspension that could in no way stabilize the car at that speed, and undersized power brakes that wouldn't stop it either. The fins jutting from the back were so high and sharp that the car was a lethal threat to pedestrians even when parked, and the whole package sat on tall, whitewall tires that looked, and generally handled, like oversized powdered doughnuts. Detroit couldn't have achieved more deadly finned ostentatia if they'd covered a killer whale in rhinestones. It was a masterpiece.

A Dirty Job is a perfect gift for someone you know who drives a hearse and loves to read - I know because I do both.