Book: My Dead Body
ISBN-13: 978-0345495891
Author: Charlie Huston
Series: Joe Pitt Casebooks
Publisher: Del Rey
Genre: Hard-boiled noir / Horror
Release: October 13, 2009
Length: 336 pages (Hardcover)
Rating: A- (95/100)
Verdict
Charlie Huston is the cure for what’s ailing vampires today. He’s single-handedly succeeded in putting the starch back into the genre and breathed a whole new life into the best traditions of Raymond Chandler. And while the entire Joe Pitt series is highly recommended reading for fans of hard-boiled noir, horror, pulp fiction, or urban fantasy, it needs to be said that My Dead Body is Huston’s piece de resistance.
Nowhere are you going to find a grittier or more action-packed noir novel, and if you’re a fan of the genre, that should be all that needs to be said.
-
Pros: Huston has a flair for razor sharp dialog. Big screen action sequences. Gritty, realistic characters. No sparkly vampire angst.
Cons: Dialogue can become a bit confusing due to Pitt’s choice of punctuation.
Synopsis
In Brief: In the conclusion to the Joe Pitt series, Pitt emerges from hiding to search for a pregnant girl and her lover in the midst of a vampyre clan war that was sparked in the last book, when Pitt revealed the dark secret behind the Coalition’s seemingly bottomless supply of blood. However, Pitt’s many enemies having been waiting for him to resurface, and it isn’t long before he is once again juggling obligations and on the run.
Official: NOBODY LIVES FOREVER. NOT EVEN A VAMPYRE.
Just ask Joe Pitt. After exposing the secret source of blood for half of Manhattan’s Vampyres, he’s definitely a dead man walking. He’s been a punching bag and a bullet magnet for every Vampyre Clan in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, not to mention a private eye, an enforcer, an exile, and a vigilante, but now he’s just a target with legs.
For a year he’s sloshed around the subway tunnels and sewers, tapping the veins of the lost, while above ground a Vampyre civil war threatens to drag the Clans into the sunlight once and for all. What’s it gonna take to dig him up? Just the search for a missing girl who’s carrying a baby that just might be the destiny of Vampyre-kind. Not that Joe cares all that much about destiny and such. What he cares about is that his ex-girl Evie wants him to take the gig. What’s the risk? Another turn playing pigeon in a shooting gallery. What’s the reward? Maybe one shot of his own. What’s he aiming for? Nothing much. Just all the evil at the heart of his world.
Review
On the whole, the fantasy genre seems to have a great deal of difficulty producing quality conclusions. For every series sitting on store shelves with a timely, well-written conclusion, there are at least three that have petered out without an ounce of grace, worn thin from being milked for all they were worth. Maybe it’s the result of the economic shortcomings of the publishing industry, but very few author have the strength of character (or the characters with the strength) to leave their world with stories still untold. As such, when the conclusion to a series does arrive, it’s hard not to approach the book without some measure of trepidation.
Luckily, Charlie Huston is the exception, rather than the rule. With My Dead Body, Huston tidily completes his excellent series on a pitch-perfect note that is certain to leave fans satisfied.
Huston describes his series best in the dedication to his third book, Half the Blood of Brooklyn: “To Mr. Stoker and Mr. Chandler. With my greatest thanks. And apologies for the liberties taken.” The dedication is fitting, given Huston’s loving homage to Raymond Chandler’s narrative style and story devices. It might have been even more fitting, though, if he had made some reference to Quentin Tarantino, because Huston’s action sequences read like something straight off the silver screen. That’s one of the things that’s so refreshing about this series, especially this book. Despite the fantasy elements inherent in a novel about a vampire, when a fight breaks out, it’s action movie material. Huston doesn’t pull any punches.
That in itself is refreshing. Somewhere along the line, “fantasy” got itself branded a PG-13 genre, which can become frustrating for an adult reader. But Huston isn’t shy about characters getting worked over or knocked off mid-story. Characters bleed, they suffer, and occasionally, they die horrifically. Enough so that this book might rightly be stocked in the horror aisle. That keeps Huston’s books edgy. Meanwhile, his dialog keep his books fresh.
The only other source I can liken the dialog of the Joe Pitt series to is the hit television series House, but even that falls short of the mark. Pitt’s razor sharp sarcasm and keen personal insights lend him a riveting quality that even his fundamental nature as an antihero can’t diminish.
To the negative, I do have a few small complaints with Huston’s series. The first is his judicious use of MacGuffins. He may do this purposefully, as it is in keeping with the private detective stories whose style Huston is emulating. Still, it becomes a bit trite when Joe Pitt resurfaces for a single day of adventure that ultimately yields none of the results he set out to accomplish – for the fifth time in a row. Maybe that’s just the result of reading the entire series back-to-back, though.
The other complaint I have with this book is that Huston builds up a lot of expectation regarding the return of a certain supernatural element of his story that never manifests. Avoiding spoilers, let’s just say that, as a long time reader of fantasy novels, I was expecting a “berserker scene” – that moment in a fantasy series when the mysterious pent-up power of the protagonist is finally unleashed. But it never came.
I wasn’t so much disappointed by this shortcoming as completely surprised. The berserker scene is part and parcel of the fantasy tradition, as integral as the prophecy that set the hero on his quest or the unfolding story of the protagonist’s tragic personal history.
Even so, My Dead Body comes out head and shoulder above most books. It’s an excellent conclusion to a superb series. I recommend picking up all five books in the series.
Similar Books
If you enjoy this book, you may also enjoy these similar books:
Further Information
|
|
|
Pingback: The Great Geek Manual » Review: My Dead Body | ReadersOwn.Com