From Publishers Weekly
Cult-hero Moore (
The Stupidest Angel) tackles death—make that Death—in his latest wonderful, whacked-out yarn. For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. Though security cameras catch nothing, Charlie swears he saw an impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit standing beside Rachel as she died. When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something's up. Along comes Minty Fresh—the man in green—to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. While Charlie's employees, Lily the Goth girl and Ray the ex-cop, mind the shop, and two enormous hellhounds babysit, Charlie attends to his dangerous soul-collecting duties, building toward a showdown with Death in a Gold Rush–era ship buried beneath San Francisco's financial district. If it sounds over the top, that's because it is—but Moore's enthusiasm and skill make it convincing, and his affection for the cast of weirdos gives the book an unexpected poignancy.
(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Bookmarks Magazine
It's certainly original. Even the harshest critic can't begrudge Christopher Moore his vivid imagination, satirical plots, and humor. Like a good sleight-of-hand artist, Moore builds up a huge reserve of goodwill to pull off his most demanding trick yet: laughing at death. The already-strained boundaries of his previous work (
Lamb, an alternate history of Jesus's life;
Bloodsucking Fiends, a vampire love story; and
The Stupidest Angel, concerning the resurrection of Santa Claus) stretch even further to produce this tale that critics praise for its "improbable humor" (
New York Times) and courage in "embracing what we fear" (
Washington Post).<BR>
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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