A Dirty Job
By Christopher Moore

Graciousness! I am NOT a fan of sci-fi normally, but after long streak of tear jerky reading I wanted to funny it up a bit. So I purposely went searching for a humorous author. The name Christopher Moore kept coming up. Everything on the Internet about this guy was great. He has great reviews all across the board. Can’t go wrong kind of writer. So, there I was three quarters of the way though A Dirty Job when I realized that. . . . I am STILL not a fan of sci-fi.

Don’t get me wrong Christopher Moore is funny. Funny. Funny. If I were funny, I’d want to be a Charlie Asher kind of funny. Charlie Asher is a second-hand storeowner in downtown San Francisco who mysteriously inherits the dirty job helping people to pass onto the other side. He has to balance his work at the store with being a father to a newborn and also his new job as a "death merchant". Charlie and his two employees, Lilly and Ray run the second hand store. Lilly is a class-skipping Goth-like high school girl with tendencies to say inappropriate things. Ray is a mid-aged ex cop with an Internet dating addiction. It takes Charlie a while to figure out what is going on with him as the job description was not crystal clear. However, once he gets going, Charlie manages for a long while. There is something much larger at hand during the story that Asher doesn’t seem to get until it’s standing beside him.

Christopher Moore’s style of writing was unique because he’s very ambiguous. The reader has to read several sentences to fully understand what is going on. Time skipped from paragraph to paragraph. Also, the vocabulary was. . . contumelious, impenetrable. . . . it was challenging!

There should really be an entirely separate section of humor called sci-fi humor so there isn’t any confusion. As much as I enjoyed the under-reactions of Charlie Asher, I believe I will stick to the over dramatics of Life Time style novels.