Half the Blood of Brooklyn

Fabulous!!! Great! Fun! Outrageous! Never a dull moment, Never a not fun moment, Always a wonderful surprise story and ALWAYS incredible dialog. Left Me Wanting MORE!

#3 Joe Pitt paranormal noir mystery. Joe is a vampire, infected with the Vyrus, and now is the head of security for one of the vampire gangs that control New York. Gone is his carefree life as a Rogue, answering only to himself--but also gone is the constant scrabbling for a living, for having a decent supply of blood. Terry, his boss and the head of the Society clan, is trying to keep the balance between the clans (and maybe expand his membership a bit) and asks Joe to protect Lydia (his assistant) in a meeting across the bridge with the boss of a small clan they hope to annex. Joe is distracted because his girlfriend Evie who has AIDS, is in hospital and failing rapidly. He has been trying to decide if he should just infect her with the Vyrus (which will kill her instantly or cure her AIDS) and make her a vampire--something he sees as a horrid last resort--or let her die. Evie doesn't even know he's a vampire at this point, so he can't even offer her the choice! There is also a strange "Van Helsing" (vampire slayer) at work, who knows his stuff, and Joe is trying to figure that into the current happenings as well. At any rate, when they head across the bridge into Brooklyn, there's big trouble waiting in the form of a previously hidden clan of Jewish vampires, who are much more powerful than Joe or anyone anticipated, and he learns that all is not what it seems and his loyalties--such as they are--are tested again and he has some major decisions to make. Some of those decisions are made for him, and he's not crazy about the choices that were made. Dark, gloomy, violent and abrasive and without an ounce of goodness and light, this book is typical Charlie Huston fare, and propels Joe Pitt down the same bloody path he's been wandering for decades, only at a faster pace. Plenty of plot twists and turns to turn up the odd surprise and with enough issues unresolved that you know you have to read the next installment to find out what happens. This book (and series) is great for what it is, but I couldn't thrive on a continual diet of this doom and gloom.

I've read all the books in the Joe Pitt series (this is the latest one; the other two are Already Dead: A Novel and No Dominion: A Novel, both of which are excellent), and this is the best so far. Before reading this one, you really ought to read the other two. Please don't start with this one, as you will lose much of the background that has led Joe Pitt to where he is. Joe Pitt is a vampire, but not the kind you're probably used to reading about. He doesn't do sunlight, but other than that, he's different in some really basic ways. He doesn't walk around crazed with bloodlust. He doesn't attack everyone he meets and then sink his fangs into neck after neck after neck. No, he and the other vampires in this book basically walk around like you and I do, except for the aforementioned "allergy to sunlight." If you've not read a Joe Pitt novel before, you should know that all of the books are brutal. There's bloodshed on almost every page. Joe is not a nice guy. Even when he does the "right" thing, he's obnoxious and maybe selfish and homicidal. He kills fairly easily. He jokes even when he's near death. He loves his girlfriend, but not enough to tell her the truth about who he is or to give her a choice to save herself by becoming a vampire like him (that girlfriend is dying from AIDS; Joe's blood, infected as it is with the Vyrus, which could save her or kill her, as there's no guarantee her body will be able to handle it). He has allegiances to people, but they're all driven by his own fight to survive, The novels are done in first person, so we always get Joe's viewpoint, which is often critical of his own inadequacies, but which is also often determinedly blase. You don't see Joe get worked up about much; I guess it's tough to get worked up when you come from an abusive household, were beaten fairly regularly as a kid, were beaten almost to death by the vamp who left you to die, are constantly threatened with the possibility of spending your last moments in the sun's warm, virulent-cancer-causing embrace. The dialogue is quick and very realistic. People speak in fragments. They stutter. Huston has a knack for making each character speak clearly in his/her own voice. Terry, the hippie vamp, speaks like a quintessential hippie (you'll feel like you're listening to someone stuck in the 60's at times); "the girl" speaks like a teenager, complete with heavy emphasis on strategically-chosen words (you can tell which by the italics); Lydia stammers and steams, and her dialogue is sometimes filled with fragments, with single words that punctuate her disgust or her contempt. In this book, Joe is challenged by the decline of his girlfriend's health, by a lifestyle he doesn't like (he's working for Terry, basically aligned with Terry's group of vamps, and he hates being part of a group), by the awareness that someone else (Daniel) thinks he's a good choice to lead another vamp group (Joe's no leader; were it up to him, he'd hermit out somewhere, or

Comparisons and superlatives be damned; there simply isn't a more talented writer of American fiction today than the hip, irreverent, and ever-so-clever Charlie Huston. This guy could write the recipe for a tuna casserole and make it a page-turner. Always one to shun convention and propriety, Huston rips another scorcher free of distracting quotation marks or chapters. Back is vampyre leg-breaker Joe Pitt in this third installment of Huston's nightmare fantasy of the undead of Manhattan, another literary feast of enough blood and gore to prove the title an understatement. If you're not familiar with Huston's brilliantly twisted twist on tired and familiar vampire lore, welcome to present day New York, where Joe Pitt and his ilk are the victims of an AIDS-like "vyrus", condemning it's hosts to near-eternal life out-of-the sun and with an insatiable demand for human blood. Huston's vampires, who walk undetected among us, have divided into clans along traditional societal lines, each with their own approach and philosophies to their affliction. Forget capes and bats and castles on crags: "Half the Blood of Brooklyn" and its prequels are 100% urban, urbane, and contemporary, more Sam Spade than Count Dracula, and so-nearly believable that you'll often forget the, um, "diet" of Pitt and his buddies. Out hero and former rogue hit man Pitt has joined up with his old buddy, Terry Bird, hippie leader of the progressive "Society" clan of lower Manhattan. But there's trouble in the boroughs, as someone or something is driving the renegade clans across the bridges onto the island, threatening to drain an already dwindling supply of blood. And when the "Candy Man" winds up carved into a dozen pieces in the basement of his Greenwich Village shop, Terry sends Pitt, distracted by his "civilian" girlfriend's losing battle with cancer, to Coney Island as part of an elaborate alliance scheme. There he encounters rival gangs bizarre by even Houston's whacked standards - a "Middle Earth meets "Rings-of-Hell" concoction that Tolkien or Dante would have killed to conjure. Huston's fiction can stand in a league of its own solely on this fresh and creative approach to an old storyline. But what sets Huston so far above the pack of clones and wannabes is the easy brilliance with which he skewers and parodies, in one fell swoop, popular crime drama, horror, political correctness, and in this outing, even Orthodox Jews! Yet his attacks are subtle and playful, the dark humor and delicious cynicism shining through the blood, guts, gore, grit, and filth that fits so neatly in Huston's unique brand of prose. If you haven't discovered Charlie Huston or Joe Pitt yet (or for that matter, Hank Thompson of the "Caught Stealing", "Six Bad Things", and "A Dangerous Man" trilogy), don't succumb to the "I don't read vampire crap" trap, and yourself a favor: Huston is the real deal - you've got to give him a try.

I dislike it when a reviewer gives away a critical plot twist in a book. So I'll just say without any resort to proof that where Huston takes the Joe Pitt series with this third book in the series will be looked back upon four to five years from now as the place where he decided to expand the scope of Pitt's world. And, in doing so, giving lot of room for this series to have the kind of run the Matthew Scudder novels have had. The Joe Pitt series has always had a surfeit of inventiveness and irony, laid on top of a fast moving, stream of consciousness style. However, much like playing a game of Go, the working space on his playing board was starting to get a bit crowded. Dominant characters had been established in the first two books and threatened to turn future plots into set-piece affairs. Half the Blood of Brooklyn removes that danger early in the book and creates wide open room for Pitt to roam in as we exit the book. If for any reason you were starting to get tired of where Huston was going here, don't worry. He's got some very exciting territory ahead of him.