Hardboiled vampires--violent and edgy

books:


	• Half the Blood of Brooklyn: A Novel Charlie Huston Del Rey, 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hardboiled vampires--violent and edgy

Joe Pitt is going through a rough time. His girlfriend is dying of AIDS, he's lost his independence and is working as enforcer for the Society, and then there's the little matter of being a vampire--with the attendant need for blood. Fortunately, Joe doesn't have much by way of morals, which helps take care of the blood issue. Less fortunately, there's something going on in New York--something dangerous. When his boss asks him to look into possible alliances with a group of vampires living in Brooklyn, Joe wants nothing more than to walk away. Unfortunately, it isn't that easy and Joe ends up walking into a bloodbath.

Between the Docks, the Freaks, and the Chosen, Brooklyn is a mess, but it's a mess that seems doomed to impact the vampire communities on Manhattan. Of course, once Joe finishes with them, there are a lot fewer to impact.

Author Charlie Huston continues his Joe Pitt hardboiled vampire fantasy with another fast-paced and violent adventure. Joe is something of an anti-hero. He's practically an equal opportunity hater, and manages to create a lot of negative feelings back at him. Using broken phrases, obscenity-laden speech, dialect tags reflecting the ethnic origins of his characters, and the continual threat of violence, Huston kept me involved in the story, reading just one more page, even when I had a hard time finding anyone to cheer for.

Pitt chooses to use a dash (--) rather than quotation marks to mark out dialogue and, I have to say, I found this distracting and slowing down my reading. The casual murder of a pan-handler and the less casual but still amoral murder of the 'Docks' gang, coupled with more justified but still gruesome violence against other characters will put off some readers, especially as Pitt seems going through the motions, not driving toward any goal, not even seeing a possible way out of the cycle of death he's caught in. Even the Enclave, which once held a bit of (unlikely) hope now is closed to Pitt.

HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN serves as a sort of ending for Pitt's relationship with Manhattan. He's burned his bridges with just about every organization on the island and will now need to create a new world for himself. When he does, it's certain to be violent, amoral, and dangerous.

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out of the frying pan into the fire

Well, kids, the gloves are off. Sure, ALREADY DEAD and NO DOMINION were pretty tough books - lots of heartless jockeying for power, lots of bones breaking, a few corpses at the end of it all - but by the end of HALF THE BLOOD IN BROOKLYN those were the good old days.

First of all, Joe's taken a job with the Society. It's the safe way to go, but Joe just isn't cut out for that kind of teamwork. His pride has suffered - and so have his morals. He's back to being a hired gun, and for the first time we see him killing indiscriminately. The bodies pile up fast.

Second of all, Evie is dying. She's physically a wreck, and she's not all there mentally, either. The crisis we've seen coming for the past couple of books has arrived: Joe has to let her die, or try to save her by making her a vampire. Naturally, things don't go as planned.

Meanwhile, Joe's sent across the river to Brooklyn. The Society is reaching out to the boroughs for allies and they've found a rag-tag band of carnival freaks who need support. They find out why soon enough: a clan of conservative Jewish vampires is well on its way to owning Brooklyn, and the circus freaks are getting in the way. Sounds simple enough - but when the Coalition and the Society are both involved, everything is complicated. Wheels within wheels.

I read with my heart in my throat for most of the book - too anxious about what would happen next to put it down for even a minute. The ending is definitely a cliffhanger - and I look forward to finding out what happens next.

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Another winner!

Huston does it again! Very fun tale, very well done! Enjoyed it a lot, and recommend if you like the noir style tale (read the other vampyre books first!).

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

?One of the most remarkable prose stylists to emerge from the noir tradition in this century.?
?Stephen King

?Hard-boiled horror, pulp noir vampires, decaying urban souls? you?re gonna need a shower after this one. . . . [Huston] kicks down the door of horror.?
?Fangoria, on Already Dead

There?s only so much room on the Island, only so much blood, and Manhattan?s Vampyre Clans aren?t interested in sharing. So when the Vyrus-infected dregs of New York?s outer boroughs start creeping across the bridges and through the tunnels, the Clans want to know why.

Bad luck for PI and general hard case Joe Pitt.

See, Joe used to be a Rogue, used to work off his own dime, picked his own gigs, but tight times and a terminally ill girlfriend pushed him into the arms of the renegade Society Clan. Now he has all the cash and blood he needs, but at a steep price. The price tonight is crossing the bridge, rolling to Coney Island, finding the Freak Clan, and figuring out what?s driving that bunch of savages to scratch at the Society?s door. No need to look far. The answer lies around the corner in Gravesend. Convenient, all those graves.

From uptown to the boardwalk, war drums are beating. Murderous family feuds and personal grudges are being drawn and brandished, along with the long knives. Blood will spill and, big surprise, Joe?s in the middle. But hey, why should this night be different from any other?

Sunset to sunrise: put off a war, keep your head attached to your neck, and save your girl. Check. Joe?s on the case.

Praise for Charlie Huston and his Joe Pitt novels

?In conceiving his world (a New York City divided by vampire clans, each with different reasons to hate Pitt), Huston gives a fading genre a fresh afterlife. [Grade:] A.?
?Entertainment Weekly

?[Huston] creates a world that is at once supernatural and totally familiar, imaginative, and utterly convincing.?
?The Philadelphia Inquirer

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