When I put up “The Gospel of Noah” some of my people wrote me and said that I should really read Christopher Moore’s “Lamb”. It is about something similar, along the lines of lost and alternate takes on the classic gospels – all done with a twist of dark humor. It sounded like something I could really get in tune with, so off I marched to the library to get my filthy hands on a copy of this “Lamb”.
Of course some genius had already grabbed the library’s only copy, and since I am way too broke to actually buy a book, I was all out of options. I thought. As I broken-heartedly browsed through the New Arrivals shelf, my eyes fell upon an unusually crisp-looking copy of an interesting hardcover book, “A Dirty Job”, stuck between the other sad dog-eared coffee-stained abominations (this is the public library after all). It was also by Christopher Moore and sported an intriguing cover. I had to go, so I didn’t even read the jacket (they always lie anyway), but just grabbed it and left.
Apparently this is his 9th novel, and the very latest one. For some reason, most probably through the good fortunes blessed only upon the truly ignorant, I had managed to get my hands on one of the most reserved books in the library system. I don’t know whose head rolled down the hallway outside Human Resources that following day, but the book was mine (all mine, I say). For 7 days that is. On the 6th day I finally got it back from my wife so I could actually read it for myself. I had had to put up with her laughing, crying, snorting and squealing for almost a week - and with her reading me most of the punch lines and the better parts of all the funniest passages - so I was a little bummed out when I finally set out to educate myself in the fiction of Christopher Moore for the very first time.
What can I say?
I fucking love it.
If this book is any measure by which his other books are written, I am in for an interesting end of the year, consuming his back catalogue. His writing is a wonderfully bastardized marriage of Chuck Palahniuk’s morose characters and Douglas Adams’ otherworldly craziness, showcasing sick wonders, a seriously fucked up gallery of players, incredible events and, most of all; amazing warmth, biting sarcasms and a really black twist of humor, bordering on the insanely macabre at times – in the very best sense of the word, of course (is there a bad one?).
The book centers on the newly widowed Beta-Male Charles Asher and his new and unexpected profession as a Death Merchant. The fact that his young morbid infant daughter entertains the company of Hell Hounds and that his life is a sudden whirlwind of soul-collecting, sewer-harpie fighting and diaper changing, all serves to make us, the readers, go from feelings of sympathy for the poor guy and his grief, to absolute empathy with his new situation instead, off-beat as it is, in all its splendor. In some sense, Charles Asher is every one of us dorks who zombie-like shuffles through life, while living out dreams of grandeur in our minds, hoping to one day rub the right lamp in our pursuit for the ever elusive genie to save us from ourselves. Charlie’s genie happens to be a 7 foot black guy in a mint green suit, but that’s all I am going to say.
The plot is maintained brilliantly throughout the book, and the humor is ever present in the biting dialogue and turn of events; sometimes subtle and refined, and other times belly-roaring laugh-out-loud funny as absolute fuck. I read this book in the waiting room to the doctor’s office the other day, with people dying all around me, laughing my ass off, tears streaming down my cheeks. Beautiful.
Very few books make me want to actually re-read them down the line, and even fewer actually make it to be kept in my Holy Grail of Bookshelves, but this is a keeper, kids… Right next to “Lord of the Rings”, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “American Psycho”, “Fight Club” and “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”.
This is one of those books I am going to annoy the shit out of all my friends with, bugging them to read, telling them all the good parts before they read it, and then have them end our friendship over it.
What the fuck ever.
Friends come and go; great modern classics like this book last forever.
(And now I owe the library 12 bucks since I was a week late. I wonder how much it would have been to buy the fucker? I suck.)
~ The Red Collar Report ~
"A Dirty Job"
by
Christopher Moore
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