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Genre: Fantasy Main characters: Charlie Asher Time and place: San Francisco, dates unknown (looks pretty contemporary to me — they have Internet and cell-phones) Summary: Charlie and his wife Rachel have just welcomed their first daughter Sophie. But Rachel dies unexpectedly and Charlie is convinced it’s the fault of a tall black man he has caught in Rachel’s room around the moment of her death. But the stranger does not appear on any of the surveillance cameras so no one takes Charlie seriously. This is actually only the beginning of the weirdness that Charlie’s life is about to become: once home he notices that some things are glowing dull red, without any visible reason. He also notices names strangely appearing in his notepad — the first being the name of a guy who died hit by a bus just as Charlie asked him something. Luckily for Charlie he manages to find the black man he saw in Rachel’s room, and he explains him the source of all the unexplained stuff: Charlie has become, without knowing or wanting, a sort of Death helper: his job is to “retrieve soul vessels from the dead and dying and see them on to their next body. If [he] fail[s], Darkness will cover the world and Chaos will reign.“. Charlie adapts to his new responsibilities with surprising ease, and for a few years everything is more or less peaceful. Until a day when soul vessels start to disappear all around the city and as a result the Morrigan begin to roam the streets. |
The book is filled with strange and colorful characters. Charlie Asher is a Beta Male and, even as a representative of Death, is one of the most normal of them all :P We have Sophie, Charlie’s daughter, who can kill anyone by simply pointing at him and saying the word “kitty”; Sophie’s hellhounds, Alvin and Mohammed, huge, black, and with no particular taste in food: they eat everything, from shampoo to home appliances; the woman who died because she ate silica gel (a.k.a. the “do not eat” stuff); Charlie’s two neighbors, a Russian woman with Cossack roots that compares everything to bears and a Chinese woman who cooks any random animal that she can put her hands on; Audrey, the woman who spent years in a Buddhist temple, learning how to keep people from dying and how to move souls from one being to another — and who’s also an accomplished tailor; the guy named Minty Fresh who always dresses in mint green; and many many more :)
Almost everything Charlie does is said by the author to be the result of his (Charlie’s) being a Beta Male. The author seems to delight in describing and developing the Beta Male persona, to the point of overdoing it in the end. The first parts are funny though :) For example:
In fact, many Beta Males, contrary to any empirical evidence, actually believe that they are Alpha Males, and have been endowed by their creator with advanced stealth charisma, which, although awesome in concept, is totally undetectable by women not constructed from carbon fiber. Every time a supermodel divorces her rock-star husband, the Beta Male secretly rejoices (or more accurately, feels great waves of unjustified hope), and every time a beautiful movie star marries, the Beta Male experiences a sense of lost opportunity. The entire city of Las Vegas—plastic opulence, treasure for the taking, vulgar towers, and cocktail waitresses with improbable breasts—is built on the self-delusion of the Beta Male.
The chapter titles were in themselves quite amusing (at least some of them) — like for example “A Streetcar Named Confusion” or “Thanatoast” (a play on words on Thanatos and toast). There are also many funny dialogues and situations, making the book a pleasure to read most of the time (for some pages I did have the feeling the author goes off in tangents a bit too much, losing my interest i the story, but those pages were very few compared to the rest). Underneath the humor were nevertheless some serious themes, like the dedication of the nurses caring for the dying (feeling the loss with every death); what happens to people’s selves after they die; what exactly is the soul and is it necessary for a human being to function and more. Why I may not always agree to the author, I must say he offers some pretty interesting angles nevertheless.
What I liked most: Despite their strangeness (and sheer creepiness at times) I was drawn to the squirrel people. First of all because I found them quite original creatures, and also because they make good visuals (just imagine a squirrel in an elaborate ball gown for example :P ). They were also on the good side and quite innocent creatures actually, and as I am an animal lover I was bound to like them (notwithstanding the fact that few of them were one actual animal, most were build out of the parts of different species). A quote about them:
And so Charlie Asher, in the service of life and light and all sentient beings, and in hope of rescuing the soul of the love of his life, led an army of fourteen-inch-tall bundles of animal bits, armed with everything from knitting needles to a spork, into the storm sewers of San Francisco.
See, they’re courageous too — what’s there about them not to like? :P
What I liked least: I wasn’t particularly bothered by the way things ended, because it sort of fit with the rest of the book — and yet, I would have liked it a bit better some other way. To be more precise, show spoiler
On the whole it wasn’t that big a deal though, it didn’t leave me with a bitter taste and it didn’t keep me from enjoying the book :)Recommend it to? Anyone enjoying Moore’s kind of humor (the world he created reminds me of Terry Pratchett). If you are not sure whether you’d like it or not I do encourage you to at least give it a try :)
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