Someone's Gotta Do it ... A Dirty Job
Harper Collins
Holy cow! It has been exactly a month since I last posted anything on this blog. Instead of providing a laundry list of excuses as to why I haven't been reading/writing, I'm just going to hang my head in shame and get on with today's entry.
A few years ago, I introduced a few of you to Lamb -- The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It was easily the funniest book that I had read in the last decade and it became the then equivalent of the D-E-S Book of the Year. Because I had enjoyed it so much, I was reluctant to read anything else by the author. Why muck with perfection? (C'mon, you had to expect at least one Jesus pun.) Quite recently, one of my good friends bought me a copy of A Dirty Job and I thought it would be churlish of me to leave it unread. Who wants to be a churl?
I can't believe I'm typing this, but A Dirty Job is almost as funny as Lamb. Set in present day San Francisco, the novel tells the story of Charlie Asher -- a slightly neurotic owner of a Bay area secondhand shop. At the beginning of the story, Asher's wife dies giving birth to their daughter Sophie. As Charlie struggles to cope with his grief and get used to the demands of a new baby, he learns that he has inherited some disturbing new responsibilities. You see, Charlie wakes up one day to realize that he's become Death -- or at least one's of death's minions (Charlie's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.) The chaos that ensues when Charlie tries to reject his new role is mordantly funny. A Dirty Job gets four scythes out of five.
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