Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible !! Brilliant !!, 18 Jan 2006
By A Customer
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.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Already Dead, 21 Feb 2007
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.
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4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hard-boiled horror, 10 Dec 2006
Joe Pitts isn't your usual kind of Private Investigator, but the case he has been assigned is a familiar one. The daughter of a rich family has gone missing - a wild child, she's headed off to the city to slum it and there's no knowing what kind of trouble she's going to get into. Her mother, who is a bit of a lush, has hired Joe, as she's heard that he has the right kind of contacts in the underworld of Alphabet City. The father wants to keep up appearances and doesn't want the likes of Joe around, so he demands discretion, and wants him to report to him rather than the mother. It turns out that their daughter is in a lot more trouble than you can imagine, and so is Joe, who gets slipped a mickey and takes a few knocks. Sound familiar? Well, the only 'Big Sleep' about this one is the terminal condition of Joe Pitt. He's already dead - a Vamprye.
Joe is part of the underworld in Alphabet City that the ordinary citizens know nothing about, pushing the Vamypre clans underground, forcing them into rival clans who look after and prey on their own turf, trying to keep it clean from a nasty Zombie infestation (or should that be Victims of Zombification?). Joe however has stumbled into something much worse - there's a carrier around who is more than just the regular mindless shambling brain eater - and the various factions, hoods, enclaves, clans and societies are more than a little upset with him for not clearing up the mess. With a young rich girl missing and dangerous rivals watching and hampering his every move, Joe finds himself in the middle of a very messy and dangerous situation.
There's all kinds of reasons why grafting horror and detective fiction together shouldn't work, but Charlie Huston is oblivious to them, mastering both genres with aplomb, merging the dark streets that a vampire haunts with the "mean streets a man must go who is not himself necessarily mean" of Chandler's Private Investigator. And a Vampyre has all the right characteristics of the reluctant, fatalistic loner with the necessarily brutality for the harsh, dark world he lives in - one that regular people know nothing about. The action flows along as it should and the writing is sharp with a hard-boiled edge we are unaccustomed to see in a horror novel. This really shouldn't work just as well as it should, but Huston adds something new here to horror mythology and does it exceptionally well. I'm looking forward to the next Joe Pitt case.
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