Review by Booklist Review
Moore has been winningly adulterating horror with comedy for more than a decade, and his last novel, The Stupidest Angel (2004), drew more delighted attention than ever. Big things are anticipated for this book, which trades in Moore's usual small-town setting for glamorous San Francisco, where ridiculously apprehensive brand-new father Charlie Asher runs a secondhand shop. Charlie obsesses that little Sophie won't draw her next breath. Instead, his wife Rachel doesn't, and Charlie blames the seven-foot guy in the mint-green suit whom he intercepts in Rachel's room. Would it were that simple. Charlie eventually learns he has joined a tiny band, to which the tall intruder already belongs, whose members must collect soul vessels--objects in which the souls of the just-deceased are lodged--and keep them until their proper, necessarily soulless, next human receptacles come along. Unfortunately, four hideous demons or deities of death want the soul vessels, too, for sustenance as they prepare to conquer the world. The book unfolds as a struggle between Charlie, who thinks he's supposed to be the new big cheese of death, and the demons. The comedy's in the fine points: of character (the men are all beta males, congenitally shy of confrontation; the women, even little Sophie, brainy eccentrics), of dialogue (lotsa rude sex and fashion jokes), of physical detail (e.g., Charlie favors, of all things, an epicene sword-cane as a weapon). If not quite as funny as some of its predecessors, this showcases Moore's most distinctive gift: maintaining a breakneck pace while seemingly just numbly fumbling along. --Ray Olson Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Weird things start happening after poor, craven Charlie learns that his wife has died postchildbirth-just moments after he spots a black gent in flashy golf clothes at her bedside. With an eight-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Contemporary fantasy and New Age fiction take another good-natured licking in Moore's ninth, which bears strong resemblances to his Practical Demonkeeping (1992) and Bloodsucking Fiends (1995). It's set in San Francisco, where mildly nerdy thrift-shop proprietor Charlie Asher experiences unprecedented stages of grief after his wife Rachel gives birth to their daughter Sophie, then dies. The presence at Rachel's bedside of a tall black man wearing green hospital scrubs foreshadows appearances by people who give off a reddish glow just before expiring, leading Charlie to confront the tall black man (named, for no particular reason, Minty Fresh), who explains that Charlie has (like Fresh himself) become a "Death Merchant," assigned "to retrieve soul vessels" from the dead and dying, and convey them to new host bodies. Okay, this seems plausible. But plots thicken as Charlie undertakes (so to speak) his new duties, aided and abetted and abused by his Punk Goth teenaged store-clerk Lily, his take-charge lesbian sister Jane, his ethnic tenants Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev, the self-proclaimed homeless Emperor of San Francisco (on loan from Bloodsucking Fiends) and precociously paranormal Sophie, who exhibits Herculean toddler powers, while being guarded by two gigantic slavering "Goggies" (actually, they're "hellhounds"). Complicating matters are Dark Forces that congregate in sewers, drive a vintage Cadillac and threaten to make dying even more unpleasant by unleashing chaos and Armageddon and all that stuff. Charlie retrieves his lost sex life and, having become a "Luminatus" with a killer workload, maintains universal order, thanks to the Emperor and the "squirrel people" (don't ask), and a climactic shoot-out provoked when a black ship of death sails into Frisco Bay. The lunacy is appealing, but the book, alas, is way, way too long. Not quite to die for, then, but one of the antic Moore's funniest capers yet. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
