Jay Yap

This is a fairly light and entertaining read. While the story's plot line may be movie-cliche familiar, and the characters are not developed much beyond the typical high school stereotypes, the humor on display rarely fails to please. Doyle illustrates to hilarious effect the one crucial life lesson that every American adolescent male must awkwardly learn to contend with–the shocking realization that the girl who actually sits next to him in his class will rarely match-up with the mythological girl who resides in his head.

Oh my goodness! This was phenomenal.

Now this is entertainment. There is a little bit of everything here–hellhounds, sharpies, goth chicks, death merchants, and as an added bonus, re-animated squirrels. Tying it all together is the tale of a slightly neurotic, but deeply devoted father of a little girl, Charlie Asher. He is a rather simple guy who is struggling to raise his new daughter under conditions that would give anyone a little stress: he has a seriously complicated new job, his support system is unconventional at best, and his daughter's emerging, but limited, vocabulary might literally kill things. And with a seemingly impending apocalypse on the way; it all may be a little bit more than he can handle.

How this is all resolved is charmingly clever and surprisingly poignant.

“A Dirty Job” might be one of the most surreal and absurd novels that I have ever read. It is easily one of the funniest. Highly recommended.

This book surprised me. I found it to still be very fresh and impactful despite the cultural familiarity of its story. Some of the passages of dialect seemed slightly obtuse, but other than that, it was a very engaging read. I particularly enjoyed the characterizaton of the Count and the other vampires as actually being quite evil–a refreshing change from the banality and wimpyness of the vampire as portrayed in current television and movies.

I really should give this no stars. It is horribly written, half-baked new-age garbage. I wouldn't feed this refuse to the rats in my back alley. There isn't a single sentence that is communicated with sincerity, or a single idea that presents a unique or fresh point of view. That this nonsense sold 20 million while “Siddhartha” remains largely sequestered to high school literature classes is one of life's bigger mysteries..