Just Finished Reading: Already Dead by Charlie Huston (FP: 2005)

Joe Pitt likes his independence, indeed he insists on it. After spending his formative years inside a rag-tag group calling itself The Society he has had enough of internal politics, bullshit and in-fighting. But no one can stand alone in the dangerous streets of New York. Everyone needs friends and protectors and they need Joe – to do their dirty work for them. One group in particular cannot be said No to. Running most of Manhattan they call themselves The Coalition and when they ask Joe to do them a favour he readily agrees. After all Joe certainly can’t exactly go around ignoring the wishes of the most powerful group of Vampires in his own city. That’s just a quick way to a slow death. The favour they ask of him seems, at first, very simple: Find a runaway kid with too much interest in the sleazy underbelly of the city and return her to her family unharmed. Of course Joe knows things are never really that simple. For one thing the girl doesn’t want to be found and certainly doesn’t want to return to her drunk mother and a father who has a disturbing interest in young girls. For another the father, one of the richest men in New York, knows that Vampires exist and seems willing to trade on that knowledge. For Joe it’s just another fucked up deal in a fucked up life. But at least he doesn’t need to worry about much in the city that never sleeps. Punks, drug dealers and even zombies don’t faze him too much because Joe is way beyond being concerned about his own life because Joe Pitt already dead. 

    

What a way to start off a collection of vampire novels! I loved this from practically the first page. Being a huge fan of noir fiction and the vampire genre it was great to see them so well mixed in this very enjoyable book. Huston has a great style that drags you into the story and makes you feel every bump in the road, every smell of garbage rotting in doorways and feel every knife thrust and the resulting spray of hot coppery blood. Yes, it’s that down and dirty. This is certainly no soft and fluffy vampire tale (I have one of those to review later!) but a very adult tale of violence, fear, insanity and horror. It is most definitely not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. It even made me cringe a few times and I’m not exactly easily offended. Other parts where of necessity hilariously funny. One of the vampire gangs was made up of characters straight out of the 60’s and 70’s who seemed stuck in that radical mind-set and the language of political correctness even arguing that the term ‘Zombie’ was offensive to those suffering from the disease but insisting that they shouldn’t be called ‘victims’ because this was a derogatory term! Pitt himself is a character full of conflict and is wonderfully multi-layered. His musing on the form and origin of vampirism is one of the most interesting I’ve read to date. The most interest clan in the novel called themselves The Enclave and treated their vampirism as an almost religious experience and dedicated their very, very long lives to understanding what exactly they had become.

As with all of the best fiction the world created by the author had the ring of truth and reality. The structure of New York with humans and vampires co-existing (though largely unknown to the human population) was very interesting indeed. How exactly you hide a population of 4,000 vampires from discovery and extermination was an ever present problem to all of the disparate vampire groups and was probably the only thing they had in common. I shall look forward to finding out much more about both the psychology and sociology of vampires in future Joe Pitt novels. Highly recommended to any lovers of our fanged friends (or should that be fiends)!