Book Review: A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore, as an author, has been someone I’ve heard about at a low level for a pretty long time, but who I’ve never read. I was familiar with Lamb, and I guess in keeping with the emerging theme this year of reading stuff I’ve been meaning to read, I picked up A Dirty Job. Not that I’d heard anything special about it - it was just the one of his books that wasn’t the middle of a series and that happened to be available from the library at the time. It has a good rating on Goodreads, for whatever that’s worth, and I was optimistic about it.

I went into it knowing that it wasn’t going to be a serious book at all, and I was really looking forward to a lighter read after a bunch of heavier reads. But the humor turned out to be pretty crude and childish, the kind of thing I would’ve enjoyed in college or high school: lots of sex jokes, a smattering of gay jokes, random moments of the main character talking in ethnic slang. Definitely low-brow stuff and a little disappointing, at least in its lack of variety.

The world building was a bit of a mess. The main character, Charlie, was experiencing the process of becoming an agent of Death, and so on that front, it makes sense that we’d be as disoriented as he is. But even after the narrative established the lore of Death Merchants and souls it still felt like some pretty significant stuff was either missing or didn’t really make sense. So too with the plot. Some of that stuff is fine as long as you don’t think too hard about it, but a lot of the book seems to rely on the reader not thinking too hard about things, which comes across as a bit messy and lacking in authority.

I wanted to love this book, low-brow humor and all, but there were just too many stumbly moments that took me out of the story. I’d be curious to read at least one more of Moore’s books because the premises from the blurbs all seem pretty ridiculous and compelling. Maybe now that my expectations have been tempered I could go into it with a more appropriate mindset.