Half the Blood of Brooklyn [Audio Cassette]

Charlie Huston returns with his third Joe Pitt novel, "Half the Blood in Brooklyn." Huston is an author to reckon with whether in his Henry Thompson trilogy or his ongoing Joe Pitt efforts. He writes in a sparse economical manner, usually in the first person, and the dialogue flows in real time without each character's comments being identified textually. His styling is in a "stream of consciousness" mode that sometimes seems to leap off the page and in other instances the reader is forced to reread the paragraph to get the proper character identified as the speaker.

The world surrounding Joe Pitt is a new world indeed. These are stories of an urban horror noir, if you will. Huston has created a civilization in which surviving vampires (infected by the "Vyrus") have congregated in a loose series of "clans" (almost gang- like) throughout Manhatten Island...each with its own governing structure and its own borders and spheres of influence and operation. There are generic "rules" that exist among all vampires such as very limited feeding on uninfected humans etc. but the rest of the governmental and societal structure of each community or clan is pretty much left to local determination.

This is where Huston shines as his characters are drawn into situations and events that sometimes make you forget the blood dependence of the characters due to the philosophical, psychological and sociological conflicts occurring between individual characters as well as between and amongst the feuding communities. There are underlying currents of loyalty, betrayal, power struggles, compassion, personal ambition etc. that play out in the back story in each Joe Pitt novel. Huston makes effective use of the philosophical clashes in individual and community value systems.

In this latest effort, Joe Pitt has abandoned his rogue status to become chief of security for The Society and his long time friend, Terry Bird...mainly to find stability while caring for his dying girlfriend, Evie. Vampires from surrounding areas, mainly Brooklyn, are sneaking into Manhatten and threatening the balance of order on the Island. Other outlying clans are seeking to merge with the larger Manhatten Clans such as the Society and The Coalition. Joe is sent to Brooklyn with Society council leader Lydia to check out the Freak Clan. They are quickly caught up in ongoing violence as the force that is driving the smaller clans out of Brooklyn becomes known and Joe and Lydia must fight their way back home.

Back home, Joe is faced with political decisions between powerful clan leaders, friends become enemies, other friends die, and he must make an agonizing decision about whether to "save" Evie or not. By book's end, war is brewing, Joe is seeking revenge, leaders and sides have changed, and Joe is once again on his own. One warning to the new reader, these books are getting more difficult to join in midstream without the background and characters of previous novels. I urge the interested reader to start from the beginning of the series rather than trying to figure things out using "Half the Blood of Brooklyn" as a stand- alone.

Comparisons and superlatives be damned; there simply isn't a more talented writer of American fiction today than the hip, irreverent, and ever-so-clever Charlie Huston. This guy could write the recipe for a tuna casserole and make it a page-turner.

Always one to shun convention and propriety, Huston rips another scorcher free of distracting quotation marks or chapters. Back is vampyre leg-breaker Joe Pitt in this third installment of Huston's nightmare fantasy of the undead of Manhattan, another literary feast of enough blood and gore to prove the title an understatement. If you're not familiar with Huston's brilliantly twisted twist on tired and familiar vampire lore, welcome to present day New York, where Joe Pitt and his ilk are the victims of an AIDS-like "vyrus", condemning it's hosts to near-eternal life out-of-the sun and with an insatiable demand for human blood. Huston's vampires, who walk undetected among us, have divided into clans along traditional societal lines, each with their own approach and philosophies to their affliction. Forget capes and bats and castles on crags: "Half the Blood of Brooklyn" and its prequels are 100% urban, urbane, and contemporary, more Sam Spade than Count Dracula, and so-nearly believable that you'll often forget the, um, "diet" of Pitt and his buddies.

Out hero and former rogue hit man Pitt has joined up with his old buddy, Terry Bird, hippie leader of the progressive "Society" clan of lower Manhattan. But there's trouble in the boroughs, as someone or something is driving the renegade clans across the bridges onto the island, threatening to drain an already dwindling supply of blood. And when the "Candy Man" winds up carved into a dozen pieces in the basement of his Greenwich Village shop, Terry sends Pitt, distracted by his "civilian" girlfriend's losing battle with cancer, to Coney Island as part of an elaborate alliance scheme. There he encounters rival gangs bizarre by even Houston's whacked standards - a "Middle Earth meets "Rings-of-Hell" concoction that Tolkien or Dante would have killed to conjure.

Huston's fiction can stand in a league of its own solely on this fresh and creative approach to an old storyline. But what sets Huston so far above the pack of clones and wannabes is the easy brilliance with which he skewers and parodies, in one fell swoop, popular crime drama, horror, political correctness, and in this outing, even Orthodox Jews! Yet his attacks are subtle and playful, the dark humor and delicious cynicism shining through the blood, guts, gore, grit, and filth that fits so neatly in Huston's unique brand of prose.

If you haven't discovered Charlie Huston or Joe Pitt yet (or for that matter, Hank Thompson of the "Caught Stealing", "Six Bad Things", and "A Dangerous Man" trilogy), don't succumb to the "I don't read vampire crap" trap, and yourself a favor: Huston is the real deal - you've got to give him a try.

I dislike it when a reviewer gives away a critical plot twist in a book. So I'll just say without any resort to proof that where Huston takes the Joe Pitt series with this third book in the series will be looked back upon four to five years from now as the place where he decided to expand the scope of Pitt's world. And, in doing so, giving lot of room for this series to have the kind of run the Matthew Scudder novels have had.

The Joe Pitt series has always had a surfeit of inventiveness and irony, laid on top of a fast moving, stream of consciousness style. However, much like playing a game of Go, the working space on his playing board was starting to get a bit crowded. Dominant characters had been established in the first two books and threatened to turn future plots into set-piece affairs.

Half the Blood of Brooklyn removes that danger early in the book and creates wide open room for Pitt to roam in as we exit the book. If for any reason you were starting to get tired of where Huston was going here, don't worry. He's got some very exciting territory ahead of him.