Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
already bought the sequel
Already Dead by Charlie Huston*, 2005.
Joe Pitt’s a Philip Marlowe kind of vampire, a white knight among bloodsuckers. He lives in modern-day Manhattan, where thousands of vampires survive by aligning with one of several factions, ranging from the Mafia-like Coalition to those oh-so politically correct revolutionaries, The Society. Yet Pitt lone-wolfs it, surviving as an independent only because the factions find him more useful that way.
The novel opens with Pitt cleaning up a messy zombie problem. Zombies, in Pitt’s world, are folks who have become infected with flesh-eating bacteria that give the host a hunger for human flesh (yes, especially brains). Pitt takes out the zombies, who because of their mindless carnage tend to draw unwanted attention to the whole undead community. That’s good. But he leaves behind a high-profile crime scene, and worse, a carrier of the zombifying bacterium. That’s bad.
In the classic noir formula of “put your main character in a fucked-up situation, then make it worse,” Pitt’s life keeps getting more and more complicated. No one’s happy with his work, least of all the well connected Coalition, to whom falls the job of political cleanup. To zero the balance sheet, Pitt has to find the carrier and make nice with some old Manhattan wealth — the Horde family, whose 14-year-old daughter, a repeat runaway, has gone to ground somewhere in Pitt’s turf. Pitt’s HIV-infected girlfriend thinks he’s developed a fondness for blue blood, and worse yet, someone — or something — has stolen his ten-pint stash of refrigerated blood.
Already Dead follows Pitt’s gumshoe work as he sinks deeper and deeper into withdrawal hell. Vampirism is an addiction, you see, induced by a blood-borne Vyrus which empowers its victims in order to feed its hunger for non-infected blood. It’s a natural urban variant on the vampire mythos, and it works delightfully in this lower Manhattan setting.
To some degree, author Charlie Huston writes as though he has a checklist of noir/hardboiled tropes, and each box must be checked. There’s a drugging, several sappings, a femme fatale, plenty of booze, a couple of lowlifes, and assorted sadists and hardboys. That Huston checks off the requisite boxes with panache goes a long way toward excusing this slavish devotion to the genre. I mean, it’s truly fun seeing Huston filling those tropes with not-quite-living-and-breathing characters. Yes, this book is a hoot, one that I ripped through in something like three days, which is FAST for me.
Is Pitt the second coming of Marlowe? Naw. Pitt captures Philip Marlowe’s bad attitude, but not his descriptive brilliance. He has Marlowe’s eye for class disparities but not his disappointment with human nature. Pitt is way past feeling disappointed. He does, however, have a personal code not unlike Marlowe’s — hence the White Knight allusion above.
It’s not a perfect novel. Yes, I always have to quibble about something. I was disappointed by Huston including a “Yes, Mr. Bond, you are about to die, so I will reveal my whole plan to you” scene, and there are one too many nick-of-time deus ex machina saves.
I think Huston has written three sequels (based on what my local Borders carries). If one metric for a novel’s quality is whether I’ll run out to buy the sequel, then yes, Already Dead is a great success. Not only is Pitt a likable vamp, but his friends and enemies are engaging characters, too. Already Dead doesn’t end in a cliffhanger, but I still want to know what happens next to these folks.
Highly recommended.
D.
*Dude has a blog. Check it out.
Related post: Lethem on Chandler.
Thanks for sharing your opinion! Have had tea sample of this on my kindle for acoupke weeks, maybe it’s time to download the rest of the book 🙂