NO DOMINION by Charlie Huston

No Dominion is Charlie Huston's second novel to feature vampire tough guy Joe Pitt, and in it we find Pitt a little down on his luck. He got on the wrong side of the largest Vampyre Clan on Manhattan—The Coalition—when he shut down one of their most profitable operations, and without them giving him the odd job Pitt has a difficult time making a living. He’s down to three pints of blood—well below his desired minimum—and he doesn’t have the money to pay his rent this month.

That's when Pitt gets a call from an old buddy. Terry is the leader of The Society, and the vampire who took Joe under his wing shortly after he had been turned, and they have a long history. Pitt was Terry’s strong-arm man for several years, and now Joe lives on Society territory at Terry's goodwill.

Terry wants Joe to look into something troubling in vampire land—the younger vampires are using a new drug that may have dire implications on not only The Society, but also the entire vampire population of Manhattan. This is where the story begins, but it doesn’t end until Joe travels the length of the Island through enemy territory, risks his life more than once and finds betrayal behind every helpful hand.

No Dominion is not your mother's vampire story. Joe Pitt is more Mike Hammer than Lestat, and it works very, very well. The underbelly of Manhattan is painted in broad, vibrant strokes and seemingly comes alive with stark description and hard action. Charlie Huston is a crime writer, and he writes with an old style—it feels like an old noir story filled with grimy streets and dives and working stiffs who can’t catch a break. It is all this, but No Dominion is also a vampire story, and a damn good one.

My only gripe, and it really isn't much of one, is it took Huston about 50-pages to really get the story moving. The opening was spent setting up the action to come, and a few times, I wanted just a little less explanation about Vampyre politics, and a little more action. But once Huston let the engine off idle, No Dominion jammed and I was sorry to find the last page

This is another reprint. It went live at SFReader 27-June-2007.

ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston

Already Dead is the story of Manhattan P.I. Joe Pitt. He is tough, violent, and cynical. Or in other words, he is a study of the classical hardboiled loner private eye, with one catch: he is a vampire. In Charlie Huston's third novel he makes the transition from hard-boiled suspense to hard-boiled horror look simple.

Huston takes the familiar, Manhattan, and creates an underworld of undead. They live, breathe, work, and basically do their best to survive without bringing undue attention to themselves. They are infected with a rare blood virus. A virus that animates them, slows their aging process, increases their strength, improves their eyesight, and essentially makes them into creatures of the night. This however is where the generic vampire mythology ends, and Huston's underground world of the undead begins. Crosses are no bother, holy water is just water, garlic is um, garlic, and they have no problem combing their hair or applying makeup while looking in a mirror. Their only real problems are, they need uninfected human blood to survive; sunlight causes skin tumors to grow at grossly accelerated rates; and politics.

The politics are what makes Pitt's world a less than desirable place. The vampires associate in clans: The Coalition, The Society, and Enclave are the big ones, and their major goal is to keep the disease a secret from the masses. Their second goal is to put the other clans out of business, and Joe Pitt, being a free agent, is caught square in the middle.

The plot reads like standard detective fare: Pitt is hired by a beautiful, seductive woman to find her runaway daughter. The Coalition squeezes him to find and dispose of the "carrier" that is spreading zombie bacterium around the city, and The Society wants to know exactly what errands Pitt is running for the Coalition, and why; while the supernatural cult-like Enclave gives Pitt a little surprise of their own. Pitt is caught in a battle of power, vice, politics and downright evil. Before the final page is turned, his life, the life of his client, and the tenuous peace of the vampire clans will all be in jeopardy. Not to mention his girlfriend--his very human girlfriend--will require some damn good explanations for everything that is happening in Pitt's world.

Already Dead is an original take on the vampire story. The prose is hardboiled and tough. Joe Pitt, the tough guy anti-hero, is a mixture of fabled private dicks Travis McGee and Mike Hammer. He is hard and violent like Hammer, but Huston adds a dash of McGee--an uncanny understanding and humanist philosophy of his condition--to keep Pitt likable and believable.

Already Dead will appeal to fans of the vampire genre, crime and detective fiction, noir, straight horror, dark fantasy and even television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This review originally appeared at SFReader 21-Sep-2006.

Zingers 2: More First Lines With Grab

We all know the rules: the first few sentences of a novel have to reach out and grab us. If they don’t we generally pass on the novel and move down the shelves until something does grab us. Here are three more novels with openings that not only have grab, but have stayed with me since I first read them. Interestingly enough, they all are mystery novels.

1. Sweating, thirsty, hot, uncomfortable, and tired to the point of explosion.

Cynically I counted my woes.

Considerable, they were. Considerable, one way and another.

I sat in the driving seat of a custom-built aerodynamic sports car, the castoff toy of an oil sheik’s son. I had been sitting there for the best part of three days. Ahead, the sun-dried plain spread gently away to some distant brown and purple hills, and hour by hour their hunched shapes remained exactly where they were on the horizon, because the 150 m.p.h Special was not moving.

Nor was I.

Dick Francis was a favorite writer of mine in the mid-1990s—heck, he still is, and this opening from his novel Smokescreen is why. His writing is interesting, his voice is very working class, and his mysteries are top-notch. Not to mention they are exciting as hell.

2. Around eleven that night, the hostess broke out the Johnny Mathis and the Frank Sinatra, and everybody quit talking about their kids and their jobs and their mortgages and their politics, and got down to some serious slow dancing out on the darkened patio in the warm prairie night of summer 1961.

This is the first paragraph of Ed Gorman’s novel Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool featuring part-time P.I., part-time lawyer, and full-time small town fix-it man Sam McCain. The Sam McCain novels are a melancholy journey into a past that no longer exists, and the opening line from Everybody's Somebody's Fool fits the mood, temperament, and relaxed sorrow that is woven into each novel of the series.

The Sam McCain novels are my favorite P.I. series still being produced—the most recent, Fool’s Rush In, is scheduled for release later this year. I hope! It was originally scheduled to be released in March, but according to Amazon.com is now scheduled for the end of August.

3. I’m sitting on the porch of a bungalow on the Yucatan Peninsula with lit cigarettes sticking out both my ears.

This first line from Charlie Huston’s super-cool novel Six Bad Things begs the question: What? It also makes me want to read further, if for no other reason than to figure out why the guy has lit cigarettes stuck in his ears. And the great thing is, the novel only gets better.

NO DOMINION by Charlie Huston

Charlie Huston is a favorite writer of mine. I read his novel Six Bad Things a couple years ago and it blew me away. The action was non-stop, and the characters—particularly the protagonist—were rendered as believable and served the story without fault. I have since read every novel Huston has published, and it is a list quickly growing.

He finished his Hank Thompson trilogy less than a year ago, and the second novel in his Joe Pitt series—a tough guy vampire based on Manhattan—was released earlier this year. Charlie Huston also has a crime novel scheduled for release sometime in August titled: The Shotgun Rule, and if there is anyone out there reading this—I want a review copy! [SFReader only gets the vampire stuff.]

With that said, my review for his second Joe Pitt novel, No Dominion, is live and online at SFReader. No Dominion starts where Already Dead left off, and it takes the reader on a fast, mean, and violent tour of the Manhattan vampire underbelly. It is quick, fun and very entertaining.

Click Here to read the review

SIX BAD THINGS by Charlie Huston

I'm super busy right now--I have three exams over the next ten days--and so my original posts will be limited. However, I hope to continue to update the blog about three times a week, and my way of doing this is to publish reviews, and other do-dads I have placed elsewhere. And today, for your reading enjoyment, is a review of Charlie Huston's Six Bad Things I wrote for SFReader. This review was originally published September 21, 2006.

Six Bad Things is not the usual fare here on SFReader. It is a crime thriller, and anything but speculative. You will, however, get hooked on the first page and won't willingly let go until the last. It will especially appeal to the horror reader: it is dark, suspenseful and packed with palm-sweating fear. This is Charlie Huston's second novel, and the second in a trilogy featuring Hank Thompson, but it stands alone admirably. You don't need to read the first title in the series--Caught Stealing--to enjoy it, but you will want to.

Hank Thompson is an American fugitive living on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He swims in the morning, sits on his swing at the local beach diner and keeps to himself. He has a cat, a few local friends and not much else. Unless you count the box buried under his bungalow with more than four million dollars inside. Unfortunately he took the money from the Russian mafia and they want it back.

This is where Six Bad Things begins, and it never lets up. A young Russian named Mickey comes to town and puts Hank together with the stolen money. He has a proposition: Mickey won't tell the mafia where to find Hank for a measly one million dollars. Hank takes the deal, but everything falls apart. He quickly finds himself back in the States running from the mob, the police, two psychotic beach bums and a businessman, who is more than he seems. They all want the money, and murder is nothing more than a tool they will use to get it.

Six Bad Things is a muscled up noir thriller. It is harrowing, hardboiled and damn fun. The plot is frantic and well paced. The dialogue is red-hot, and has the feel of authenticity: "For now. I tried to get ahold of Terry, you know, see if anything had popped up, but he ain't around. I can try him in the morning, I mean after the sun comes up. But."

The characters are fleshed out and drawn to perfection. The good guys aren't always good, and the bad guys are pretty damn bad. The body count is high, but Huston is able to keep protagonist Thompson likable and even better, believable. Six Bad Things will leave you breathless and waiting--very impatiently--for the next Hank Thompson novel to arrive. If you can make this book last more than a few days, you should check your pulse. You might be dead.

A Dangerous Man by Charlie Huston

It’s no secret I’m a big—hell, giant—fan of the work of Charlie Huston, especially his crime fiction. Does he write anything else? And I finally—finally!—read the final novel in his Hank Thompson trilogy, A Dangerous Man.

A Dangerous Man begins where Six Bad Things left off—Hank is working for the Russian mafia trying to pay off his debt. The four million dollars he stole is long gone, and his life has gone to shit. He doesn’t recognize the face in the mirror—literally—and the things he does to stay alive haunt him. The violence, the pain, and the death have caught up with Hank. He doesn’t have the energy, or the desire to keep going. He wants everything to end.

Charlie Huston is the future of crime fiction. His novels are well-plotted, adept and always edgy. They touch a nerve with solid, high impact prose, sharp dialogue and an overwhelming sense of place and time. They capture the culture with a snapshot of impotent, raw rage. The city streets are heartless, mean and cruel, yet Huston finds the soft, tender underbelly of the characters he writes. He makes them human. He makes you like them, all of them, from good to bad.

A Dangerous Man starts a little more slowly than the first two Thompson novels, but by page 50 it rockets out of the garage. The plot twists are unexpected and the writing, as always, is dark, literate and very entertaining. I loved this novel, and I can’t wait to see more crime novels from Charlie Huston. I’m just sad Hank Thompson won’t be in them.

No Dominion by Charlie Huston

Okay, I've been just a bit behind around here lately, but I'm doing my best to catch-up, and this post certainly won't help. I just wanted to brag. I received my review copy of Charlie Huston's latest Joe Pitt novel--the vampire P.I. who has more in common with Travis McGee and Mike Hammer than Lastat. It's titled No Dominion, and received a starred review from the venerable Publisher's Weekly. So it's probably pretty great, but you'll have to come back to read just how truly great it is--give me a week or two, and then SFReader a little longer.

Damn. I can't wait.

The Best of 2006

I know you have been waiting all year to read my best of 2006 list, and so to satisfy your hunger, here it is. But first, a few remarks: 1) These titles weren't necessarily published in 2006, but rather I read them in 2006; 2) I tend to re-read some of my favorite authors / titles, and to keep the list fair, a book has to be new to me to be included; 3) I completed fifty books this year, down from 77 last year, and 75 the previous year--a slump, or am I just busy? The latter, I think.

Drum roll, please. And picture your favorite celeb at the podium in their best dress / tuxedo with a modest smile and outrageously expensive haircut. Ready? Here goes. (They are listed in descending order, and order in this case does matter.)

5) Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston. This was a two day wonder. I opened, I read and I damn near couldn't put it down. Damn sleep, damn school, damn work. Preston is best known for his collaboration with Lincoln Child, but Tyrannosaur Canyon is all Preston, and I liked it as well, and better than most, of his collaborations. The action is swift, the characters are likeable, and the story is sharp. I was disappointed when this one ended.

4) Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston. This is the first installment of Huston's Hank Thompson trilogy, and it rocks. If you want cool, Huston writes it. If you want adventure, crime, violence, scary-as-shit suspense, Huston writes that, too. Start at the beginning, and read them all.

3) The Narrows by Alexander C. Irvine. I read this one for SFReader, and I loved every minute of it. It is an urban fantasy / historical novel set in World War 2 Detroit. Irvine's descriptions of the city feel so real you can almost hear the slightly disgruntled baseball fans watching the Tigers lose again and again, and even better you can damn near smell the hot dogs and beer. If you like historical novels, fantasy, or just great story-telling read this book.

2) An Obituary for Major Reno by Richard S. Wheeler. I read this book in January, but its images of a haunted Major Reno and his role at the battle of the Little Bighorn is still fresh in my mind. Wheeler takes the much maligned Major Reno and gives him a face, a life, and allows the reader to observe the man as a man, rather than a scape-goat. Richard Wheeler is a master of the western story, and this book very well may be his masterpiece.

1) The Crimes of Jordan Wise by Bill Pronzini. Pronzini is a master of the mystery, and while his Nameless Detective series is terrific, I always look forward to his stand alone novels because they have an atmosphere and tension that set them apart from his series books. The Crimes of Jordan Wise is part crime novel and part philosophy. The action is there, the atmosphere is sharp and haunting, but the story peels away to reveal something far deeper. My only wish is that more people read Pronzini. And he wrote several dozen a year.

Well, there you have it. For better or worse, was it worth the wait?