A Dirty Job

By Christopher Moore

Charlie's life is in crisis. He has just lost his young wife, who suddenly and unexpectedly died shortly after giving birth to their daughter Sophie. If it wasn't for the baby he might well have given up. Then, in addition, he finds himself with an unexpected and troublesome new responsibility: picking up the souls of the recently deceased and shepherding them into their new body. Fortunately, this new sideline fits right in with Charlie's current job for he is the owner of a secondhand shop.
This requires a word of explanation. In the world of this story, souls do not necessarily come attached to a baby when it is born. In fact, most people live for decades before they acquire a soul. Also, the soul is contained within an inanimate object which can be something as mundane as a music CD or as weird as silicone breast implants. So Charlie is mystically given the name of a person who will soon be dead and he goes to them and acquires their soul which is contained in some object, like a necklace, and he puts the object in his shop where it will be bought by some body that needs a soul. I know, it sounds really peculiar. But that is the major premise of the story.
Anyway, not only does Charlie find himself ferrying souls, he also has to deal with the forces of darkness which are stealing souls and devouring them to make themselves stronger so they can take over the world. This part of the story is just your typical nebbishy good guy with unknown special powers taking on the bad scary demon guys (or gals, in this case) intent on ruling the world and making things hard for humanity. But with the help of his friends and even of his little daughter and some hell-hounds, Charlie may be able to save the world.

The author tells a pretty good tale and has quite an imagination. The novel has its lighter moments though the tone is pretty dark overall. The novel has a kind of a half-assed happy ending, not too satisfying but somewhat amusing, at least the author probably thought it was amusing. But this is a guy who thinks the term fuck puppet is amusing, or at least that is what I guess since he uses it over and over. Overall, I found the story interesting and even occasionally funny, though a lot less funny than I was hoping it would be. Or maybe its humor just didn't appeal to me.

New Word

Bricolage: A term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts and literature, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available; a work created by such a process. "Well, it wasn't really a bookstore anymore - it still had a couple of tall cases of books, but the rest of the store was a bricolage of bric-a-brac, from plumbing fittings to football helmets."