MY DEAD BODY
Charlie Huston
Del Rey
Thriller
ISBN: 9780345495891
If you are looking for the definition of hard-boiled noir fiction, you do not have to go much further than Charlie Huston. In the Joe Pitt Casebook series, of which MY DEAD BODY is the last installment, Huston successfully blends together mystery and horror and delivers readers with a classic, original and, to put it mildly, bloody series.
The first line of MY DEAD BODY perfectly defines a noir story: “If you’re listening to this, I’m dead.” It is hard to put a book down at that point. Our protagonist has fallen upon hard times. Indeed, he is gradually falling apart and is now missing an eye, a toe, and suffers from a broken knee. We learn that Joe is trading his body parts in order to locate a non-infected pregnant girl who might be carrying a baby infected with the virus that creates Vampyres.
Joe is a man with a price on his head and living in a train tunnel on the Upper West Side, feeding as needed off the other lost souls of subterranean New York. “And when this started, I was a secret. Lived in an apartment, just like you. Well, just like you if you kept a mini-fridge of blood. When it ended I was living in a sewer. Downward mobility being a danger to my kind.” He tells us this in a voiceover reminiscent of classic film noir tinged with a sense of horror that is new to the genre.
One of the things that makes this series so fresh and original is that these are not your black cape, bad teeth vampires. Joe says to the reader at one point, “No monsters in this world. Just us people.” These people have been infected by an HIV-like virus that created their thirst for blood. They have allied themselves in secret, powerful clans to provide mutual aid for one another. But humans are territorial by nature, and disputes are inevitable. It is Joe’s earlier work first as a private eye, then as an enforcer for The Society clan, and finally as a traitor that has landed him in his precarious position at the start of MY DEAD BODY.
Now, due in large part to Joe, long-time tensions between the clans have erupted into outright civil war over the missing girl. Some want to use the girl and her child as a symbol of cooperation and unity between the non-infected world and the infected. Others see the girl as a threat to be eliminated since she will bring the wraith of the non-infected world down upon them. And a third group sees the unborn child as needed for scientific experimentation and discovery.
But Joe’s sole concern is the only person in the world he loves, Evie, who he saved in a previous novel from AIDS by giving her his infected blood to kill the disease. Now she has taken refuge in the Enclave, a mystical, possibly insane, collective of Vampyres. Evie sends words to Joe that she wants him to help find the girl, a request that he accepts just so he can see her one last time.
Another brilliant feature of this series is that Huston exploits the urban legends and paranoia of a city like New York perfectly. People racing by on subway trains can’t help but wonder who or what exists in those labyrinth pitch-black tunnels. Urban vampires, like alligators in the sewers, couldn’t be real, could they? When Joe comes back above ground at night, of course, he discovers that the war is getting out of control. Huston echoes here the bad old days of New York City in the 1970s, when a president of the United States told it to “drop dead” in a famous tabloid newspaper headline and nobody in their right mind would venture into a public park after nightfall.
Thankfully, things aren’t nearly as bad now. But the line between order and chaos is never that strong in the best of times, and these clearly are not the best of times.
Huston captures perfectly the sense that the center is not holding and something very bad is approaching. The war between the clans threatens to be exposed. Will it result in concentration camps for Vampyres as homeland security threats? Will the non-infected insist on rounding up Vampyres for their own safety. Or do the non-infected have something even greater to worry about: that they are part-monster themselves?
Charlie Huston provides a non-stop adrenaline rush of excitement in MY DEAD BODY --- as with all his novels, it is not for the squeamish --- and he closes the series with an explosive twist. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we see more additions to his impressive bibliography.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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