Product Description

They live among us, slaves to the very condition that empowers them. They are the Vampyre, and their sole chance at survival lies in banding into Clans. Only Joe Pitt has gone his own way. The upside is freedom. The downside is there's nobody on his side when trouble comes around. Joe gets rough receptions from all the countless Clans shifting about on the island of Manhattan, but his current trouble is with the Coalition ? the Clan that controls the city river to river, from 14th Street to 110th Street. To make things right, Joe takes on his most perilous case: The daughter of a prominent New York family is missing, and her Vampyre fascination makes Joe the ideal man for this high-stakes job. With his ferocious style, Charlie Huston offers a thrilling new twist to one of our oldest myths.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37348 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
'Huston does an irresistible and fiendishly original take on the vampire myth' Publishers Weekly 'The terse, hard-boiled prose and characters contain shades of Raymond Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, and Quentin Tarantino, but are wholly original' Washingt

About the Author
Charlie Huston lives in Manhattan with his wife, the actress Virginia Louise Smith.

Customer Reviews

Horrible !! Brilliant !!
This book is profane and very nasty (as are his non vampire books)but Charlie Huston is a bit special, I think. He writes stories that are very exciting. It's a case of just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, they just did. And he does it at a pace and with a wit that has me gasping at the outrageous talent of the man. I discard a lot of books half read out of sheer bordom but this author keeps me on the edge of my seat, hyper-ventilating and ripping over the pages as fast I can. Even if some of those pages have me wincing with the nastiness of it all. I can only imagine that Charlie Huston is going to sink into obscuriy because there aren't enough readers who can take the horror or he's going to be a superstar.

Already Dead
Having read the review already posted, I had great hopes of this. They were not met. On one level the idea of a vampire-PI hold a lot of attraction. After all, if dinosaur-PI fiction works well, then why not give the undead a turn?

Why three stars? Unfortunately, Huston chooses to recycle the kind of tale MacDonald, Chandler and Hammett were writing sixty years ago. Oh, and add Robert Towne's 'Chinatown' to that list. I can never get enough of that genre but these days it does demand more originality than the supernatural veneer the author applies to his tale. Minus one star for that.

Then there is the strange formatting of dialogue that make this a hard book to read. What's the point? Huston uses several self-indulgent stylistic quirks which just get in the way of a reader's enjoyment. Minus another star.

If this book had a decent editor (or if Huston had just listened to his) then it would be much, much better. It is a good book, just not as good as Huston thinks it is.

Lots of Blood and Gore, but More Fun than Anyone Oughta Get out of a Book
Tough talking, no nonsense private eye Joe Pitt works the seamier side of the city that never sleeps. Vampyres, shamblers and zombies are his beat, but he's used to them, being sort of a vampyre himself. The Big Apple after dark has a side not seen by most. Divided up by Vampyre clans, like the powerful Cotillion, the aggressive Hood, the political Society and the mysterious and secretive Enclave, New York is the place were vampyres can live among humans, for it seems that if they move to the country, they die shortly after. In the city they can get the blood they need for survival, because they are infected with a virus that though it makes them stronger than ordinary humans, makes them heal faster and slows the aging process, it feeds off their blood, so they have to keep replenishing it.

Hard boiled Joe Pitt belongs to no clan. He goes it alone, he has no loyalties, except to himself, and perhaps his HIV infected girlfriend Evie, who is terrified of having sex, because of what she can pass on. Joe knows he could cure her, but are the side effects worth it.

There are zombies loose in the city. These characters feed on human brains in gruesome, but delightful scenes, and it's Joe's job to eliminate them. Then Dexter Prado, the head of the cotillion wants Joe to find Amanda Horde, the missing daughter of Dr. Dale Edward Horde and his wife Marilee, who perhaps drinks a bit too much. Joe doesn't like working for humans, but it seems this is special to Prado, plus unlike most humans, Marilee knows about the vampyres, plus one's got to wonder just what Amanda knows.

And it seems there is a shambler on the loose, merrily chomping on human brains and infecting them with a flesh-eating bacteria. Joe's gotta find the shambler, put a stop to him. He's gotta find the missing Amanda. He's got that relationship with Evie to deal with and he has to solve these problems between the pages of perhaps the kinkiest, most gruesome, most fun vampyre book around. It's almost like someone took Christopher Moore, Richard Laymon, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and John Connolly, threw them all in a giant mixing vat and came up with John Huston.

If I had to describe this book in just one word, it would be, "Bravo