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"Already Dead" by Charlie Huston; Ballantine ($12.95)
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After making a splash with a pair of crime novels, "Caught Stealing" and "Six Bad Things," Charlie Huston goes for the cannonball on his inspired third outing, "Already Dead," which mixes and matches pulp genres in a delightful way.
Imagine Philip Marlowe living as a vampire in Alphabet City. That's Joe Pitt. Although, as the book's title implies, "living" may be a bit of an overstatement.
No question about it: Joe is a vampire. He has to wrap himself up like Michael Jackson in Vegas before he can venture out into direct sunlight. He got turned out when he was a teen squatter, initiated in the men's room of a punk club in the Village.
The city is swarming with his kind. At least Manhattan is. Joe doesn't mix much with the bridge and tunnel crowd. Clans of vampires have divided the borough into rigidly drawn fiefdoms. The largest piece of the island is claimed by the Coalition, an old and affluent society with headquarters in an imposing brownstone on the Upper East Side. They're the Rockefellers of the vampire set. Even have their own blood bank.
Joe lives downtown on Society turf. He's a rare independent agent without clan affiliation. The Society cuts him some slack because for many years he functioned as their enforcer. Now he ekes out a living doing jobs for the Coalition and other vampire guilds.
He also has a girlfriend, a comely bartender named Evie. She doesn't know about his true nature, and she refuses to have sex because she's HIV positive.
Then a pair of cases take Joe far outside his comfort zone. He's hired to locate a rich teen who has run away from her Park Avenue duplex and is partying with the street kids downtown. And he has to find and dispatch a zombie who is grazing in the Village. For obvious reasons, the vampires prefer to live in the shadows. Zombies tend to draw the attention and outrage of the civilian population.
While pursuing these matters, Joe steps on the wrong toes. In retaliation, they break into his apartment and steal his precious stash of hemoglobin. His withdrawal ordeal is as harrowing as anything in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces.
Huston's accomplishment here is considerable. Using plain language, he creates a world that is at once supernatural and totally familiar, imaginative and utterly convincing. He is rapidly establishing himself as the Jonathan Lethem of genre fiction.
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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
