“Already Dead”
by Charlie Huston
Random House, 288 pages

The pulp and vampire genres are fairly well worn and it’s hard to find an original voice among the Raymond Chandler imitators and Anne Rice wannabes. Enter Charlie Huston, whose third book, “Already Dead,” injects the mean streets of New York with some vicious vampire action. It’s a promising start for a pulp series that pays respect to the old-school while taking a path all its own.

Like most pulp heroes, Joe Pitt’s got plenty of problems. First, he’s a vampire. Second, there’s a zombie infecting people in his neighborhood and he can’t seem to find it. And to top it all off, the rest of Manhattan’s vampire clans are all not-so-gently nudging Joe, an independent operator, to join up with them. And, oh yeah, there’s a missing girl a rich client has hired him to find—a girl who may be, like Joe, already dead.

Huston’s writing is fairly tight, for the most part. His style is reminiscent of the best parts of pulp masters, combining Chandler’s romanticism and sentimentality with James Elroy’s cynicism and graphic brutality. When Huston wants to get gross and gory, he does it with style and suspense, particularly during the book’s gruesome climax. Joe’s one hell of a tough guy, but, like Chandler’s character Phillip Marlow, Joe also has that whole “crusading knight” thing going on. And that’s what gives “Already Dead” its (undead) heart and tough sentimentality. Joe shows just how human he really is when he has to kill a friend who’s been infected by a zombie, or when he talks about his girlfriend Evie and their paradoxical relationship. She’s got HIV and won’t sleep with him; he could infect her with the Vyrus and cure her HIV, but doesn’t want to saddle her with the pain of being undead.

That whole “pain of the undead” shtick is where “Already Dead” falters, though. When Huston’s writing dialogue or action sequences, he’s spot on. But when he gives Joe a couple of private moments to ponder his vampire lifestyle, everything screeches to a halt. I’ve never personally bought the whole vampires-as-tragic-figures thing, but I guess it comes with the territory.

Huston makes up for the handful of angsty moments that pepper the book by giving Joe Pitt a nicely fleshed-out universe to play in. The mythology behind the Vyrus is Richard Matheson-esque, and the way Manhattan is carved up—by philosophically different rival vampire gangs—is a great concept. The supernatural is generally shied away from, which is good. As Joe makes his way through New York’s underworld, the pimps, pornographers and pushers he encounters are far more unsettling than the zombies and vampires, because the living don’t have any boundaries (such as not going out after sunrise) to constrict their bad behavior. When supernatural elements do make it into the plot, they feel weak. The sudden appearance of a wraith during key points in the book seems like a deus ex machina, and the insinuation that Joe may be the messiah figure for a fringe vampire clan distracts from the otherwise very visceral details Huston uses to ground Joe in reality.

But these complaints are minor. Huston’s created a cast of compelling characters and set them in a world that’s very familiar and very different, a feat that books of both the vampire and pulp genre have a hard time accomplishing. Could Joe Pitt be the next Sam Spade of Phillip Marlow? Not quite. But for a guy who complains about being dead, Joe Pitt probably has a long literary life ahead of him.