Already Dead is Charlie Huston's X-rated version of Joss Whedon's Angel in a New York setting, with a virus that causes vampirism.
Already Dead is Charlie Huston’s debut novel. Imagine an X-rated version of Joss Whedon’s Angel, soaked in blood and four-letter words, where in the opening pages a young girl cracks open a man’s skull to feast on his brains, and the reader has a very good summation of Huston’s novel.
Except that, if Charlie Finlay’s words to his writing student are correct and short stories are about ideas, novels are about character, then Joe Pitt has far more character in a few pages than Whedon and David Greenwalt managed to pour into five serious of David Boreanaz’s wooden-faced vampire PI and his band of demographically politically correct sidekicks (the cute [white] chick with the power for the geeks, the surprisingly well-spoken gangsta boy to attract the black teens, the nerdy professor for the geek chicks, and latterly Spike for the goth chicks).
There are no trusty sidekicks for Huston’s Pitt to fall back on, only other players who he in turn tries to play against one another, and a lot of people who owe him favours, but are keen to see the slate wiped clean.
The story is relatively simple. There are two main plot strands. In the first, someone is going around infecting people, turning them into vampires, but doing so in public and in a way guaranteed to attract attention. For the clans who control Manhattan’s vampire underbelly, this is bad news. The last thing that they need is the news that there are vampires making the six o’clock news. So the ruling clan of Upper Manhattan, the Coalition, ‘hire’ Pitt to track the source down and eradicate him or her.
The second thread is when Pitt is hired -- in best Maltese Falcon-style – by a beautiful young woman to find her missing daughter, who has a dangerous fascination with the Undead world.
Unsurprisingly the two threads become interconnected very quickly, and Pitt is fighting for his life, such as it is, against all comers. There is little that is original in Dead Already, and the narrative has a habit of leaping ahead and then having to backfill to allow the reader to catch up that swiftly becomes annoying; and yet, and yet…
Dead Already has a hero who is personable, the New York setting is superbly well drawn and the effects of the virus that causes vampirism so well detailed that it’s impossible not to be pulled along. Dead Already is the first of a series, and the second is going to be watched for by Huston’s fans with feverish anticipation.
