Book Review by Kerey McKenna.
Now that November is here and things are getting darker, it’s time to turn the clock back a bit here at Nerds who Read. Not just by an hour for a bit of extra shuteye this Sunday morning. Instead, back to a time and genre where hard-boiled men wore their hats just so in mean city streets and the haze wafting around a femme fatale might be from her smoking cigarette—or her smoking gun.
As it is November 1st and the Halloween decorations are just about to be given the bum’s rush to make way for Christmas, I thought we might borrow a creature of the night or two for our first entry in Noir November, Already Dead. The first in Charlie Huston’s six-part Joe Pitt Casebook series of novels, Already Dead follows the adventures of Joe Pitt, a vampire in New York City, trying to make an un-living doing the dirty work of the city’s feuding vampire clans.
First a little introduction to the genre of Urban Fantasy. In broad strokes Urban Fantasy is what happens when you take the mythical and magical creatures of folklore—ogres, wizards, boggarts, werewolves, and what have you—and pave over their lush forbidden forests and decrepit keeps with cities of steel and concrete. Like owls, raccoons, and foxes foraging in dumpsters, some creatures don’t actually change that much; they exchange the dark corners of the forest for the dark alleys of the city, growing fat because nobody looks too closely at the missing persons or even murder rates of a large city. Other creatures make something of themselves in the city and take quite well to “civilization.” An enterprising witch opens up a shop for hipsters looking for “organic alternative medicine.” Trolls and ogres use their muscle to start protection rackets. Furthermore the cities attract people from all over the world and those people bring their own spirits, monsters, demigods and demons. A Dullahan, the headless horseman of Celtic myth might trade in his nag for a Kawasaki and tear through the streets of Tokyo while half a world away a Kitsune, a beguiling Japanese fox woman, might ensnare an eligible bachelor in Manhattan. Urban fantasy offers up a metropolis full of possibility as mythologies mix and mingle and creatures have to survive in the big bad city. As film noir and the pulps wrote much of the book on how to tell stories set in the city, it should be no surprise that many urban fantasy stories are also…noir stories.
Which brings us back to Joe Pitt. His stories don’t just take the teeny bopper glitter off the vampire left by the Twilight and Vampire Academy YA series. They take the romantic gothic horror and aristocratic tropes from Stoker to Rice and cover them with urban grime and grit. Then they rough up those tropes for being in the wrong part of town and leave them curled up in an alley after rifling through their pockets for walking around money.
Joe Pitt is by no means the first vampire (or vampyre as the book insists) urban fantasy protagonist...but in some ways he is more real and down-to-earth than the more celebrated undead. He isn’t all that long in the tooth and therefore doesn’t share the angst of vampires who belong in another age, like Angel or Michael Knight. He doesn’t have the cutting edge equipment or fancy martial arts of the daywalker, Blade. He most certainly does not have the flashy wardrobe and pretentious nom de guerre of Alucard.
What Joe does have is street smarts and a burning desire to survive on his own terms. He “doesn’t drink...wine,” because when he’s not discreetly sneaking some plasma he’s knocking back whiskey with the rest of the gray-collar criminals and working class of the city.
The Pitt series doesn’t go in for elaborate mythology or flashy magic powers. Joe’s world consists of navigating the human and vampyre underworlds of the city doing enough odd jobs, chiefly investigator, enforcer, and bodyguard. The virus (or vyrus, Huston loves that y for i substitution) that creates vampyres is a grab bag of strengths and weaknesses. Humans stop aging and become more resilient when they become a vampyre, but they are by no means impervious to conventional weapons. While they will be unravaged by age and resistant to most poisons, direct sunlight will melt them in under a minute. While the vampyres are in no hurry to “come out of the coffin” and human vampyre hunters are a distinct possibility, the greatest danger for an urban vampire is other urban vampyres.
Joe is an independent contractor in an island full of vampyre clans vying with each other for power, territory, and the limited supply of human blood that can be discreetly syphoned from the donor supply. While Joe has friends in The Society—a group of “youngish” vampyres styled after the 1960’s-70’s radical left—he values his own autonomy over their political agenda, that agenda being chiefly tussles with the corporate and old money vampyres of the Coalition faction. To further complicate matters, the Enclave—the only group of vampyres explicitly interested in the occult—have their own plans and prophecies concerning Pitt. In Already Dead, Pitt has to navigate the precarious detente between the rival gangs to find a missing heiress, stop an outbreak of zombieism, and along the way make enough money to pay the rent and keep his stash of refrigerated blood sufficiently full that his friends and neighbors don’t look like four-course meals on legs.
As I said urban fantasy offers a world of possibilities as a genre. If you like your crime fiction and your gore full of blood and pulp, the Joe Pitt novels would be a good place to start.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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