Customer Reviews

Every Last Drop: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Let me first say that I love the works of Charlie Huston. All of his books I have read until now have been five star, rock-n-roll, pull-no-punches, burn the barn down, extraordinary works. His Caught Stealing: A Novel trilogy is one of my favorite series, and his Joe Pitt vampire stories, of which this is the fourth, are howlingly good. Yet I had a reservation about this latest book which I'll explain in just a sec.

For those of you running across this series for the first time, do yourself a favor and get the first book in this series, Already Dead: A Novel, and start reading from the beginning. This is a darkly lyrical, powerfully told story of vampires in NYC, but unlike any vampire story you've read before. In Huston's world, vampires mostly lead lives of quiet desperation, drink whiskeys with a beer back, smoke cheap cigarettes, scrabble to pay the rent, and have to contend with a dangerous addiction to blood. Gotta have it, or you will die. However, you just can't start knocking people off or the boys in blue will catch wise and then it's genocide for vampires time. To protect their existence, the vampires have formed into clans who divide up Manhattan and police themselves ruthlessly and contend with other clans much like rival gangs. Huston's vampires are not romantic figures nor are they any more horrific than humans. They were once ordinary people struggling to get by and now they're the same people, with a need for blood, struggling to get by. The protagonist, Joe Pitt, is a big tough guy, living without clan membership, struggling to get by in the cracks of vampire and human society, working gigs as a bouncer or sometimes doing investigative jobs for some of the vampire clans. Huston's works are filled with many memorable characters just as real life is. There are transvestite, hippie, financial mafia, and gay and lesbian rights vampires in these noirish tales with more to do with crime fiction than horror.

For those of you who have read the first three books and are just checking the reviews of this one before purchasing, c'mon, who are you kidding? You're going to buy this book and read it regardless of what anyone says here because you already know this series is more addictive than blood. In this fourth installment, Joe is living in the hinterlands of the Bronx and not enjoying himself so much when he is captured and mutilated by an old enemy. "Rescued" by Predo, another old enemy and ordered back to Manhattan to spy on old friends. The story is engaging, violent, noirish and fun, just like the first three tales. The story rockets forward with Joe, ever the spoiler, precipitating what looks like will be an all out war between the Society, the Coalition, the Enclave, and The Cure (a brand new vampire clan). And there the story stops, which is my peeve with this book. We are left hanging with no resolution of the big conflict set up in the first 250 pages. Huston has always written brilliant tales that you leave with a satisfying conclusion to the crises created in the novel, even if there is always room to create another crisis for the next novel. He doesn't do that here, and this book feels like the first half of a book as opposed to a whole book in and of itself, and I was disappointed that the story just stopped with no resolution. I didn't like being set up for fireworks and then finding I will have to wait I don't know how many months for a resolution. So while this is a great story, it is only half the story. Therefore I am awarding four stars for the first time to a Huston novel. Normally I would counsel people to grab Huston's books as fast as they can get their hands on them, but this time my advice is to wait to read this one until the next one comes out and them read them together. Then again, I've never been one for delayed gratification, so if you don't mind half now, then half later, go ahead, this is still the darkly enjoyable Pitt series in fine form.

Just a warning, this will not be a spoiler-free review.

In Charlie Huston's fourth Joe Pitt novel, the tension rises as protagonist Joe Pitt returns from exile to exact revenge and, once again, play all sides against one another to get what he wants. From dealing with savage, african inspired savages, digging up old skeletons from his past across the river, to uncovering a secret so large, it could potentially destroy life altogether for those that carry the vyrus. Not to mention the long awaited rendezvous...

Being a reader since the first title (Already Dead) I couldn't wait for this book to drop, but was also slightly worried. After all, Huston's last three had been knock outs, could he capitalize on the universe he had built??

The answer, which comes as no surprise, is yes. Every Last Drop is just as gory, engrossing, and fast paced as the rest of the series has been. I literally couldn't put this book down until the very end. I anxiously wait the conclusion to this five-part masterpiece.

Take the unlikely combination of Elmore Leonard and Bram Stoker and you get Charlie Huston and Joe Pitt, Huston's vampire-heavy who prowls the streets of New York City's boroughs in "Every Last Drop", the fourth installment of the most hip, irreverent, and darkly innovative crime fiction to hit the shelves since Raymond Chandler.

In this go around, after burning bridges with all the undead folks who matter in the various tribes of Manhattan, Pitt is exiled to the wild and unaffiliated wastelands of the Bronx and Queens, where untamed vampire gangs stalk home-bound Yankees fans, their blatant feedings threatening to expose the undead's existence to the world at large. Pitt's misfortune puts him in the hands of the abominable "Lament", an ancient and nefarious villain who corrupts and runs bands of vampire youth in the Bronx, to be rescued - in a fashion - by his old nemesis, Dexter Predo of the upscale "Coalition" clan. Predo tasks Pitt with penetrating the upstart "Cure", headed by the brilliant and uninfected Amanda Horde, the young debutante rescued by Pitt in the first installment of this off-the-wall series. But Pitt has his own agenda - getting back to his familiar streets of Manhattan, and finding the fate of girlfriend Evie left in the "care" of the frighteningly surreal "Enclave" at the conclusion of "Half the Blood in Brooklyn." Before this one wraps up, Pitt has discovered a horror unspeakable evil, evil even as defined within the context of this Tolkien-like nightmare world of vampire clans co-existing peacefully - well, mostly peacefully - with New York's straight citizens. Pitt's discovery leaves the clans are on the verge of war, and Pitt with a few less pieces than when he started all the fun.

OK, so in reading this review, if you're not familiar with Huston's Joe Pitt, you are probably thinking "what the Hell is this idiot talking about?" And indeed, "Every Last Drop" is definitely NOT the place to start this provocative and insightful series that parodies not only the obvious horror fare, but also a wide diversity of topics from social progressiveness to Wall Street greed. The transformation of the series is fascinating - from the blood-heavy "Already Dead", entrenched in vampire lore, to this one, in which the whole vampire-shtick is almost incidental to a story that is far, far more pulp crime fiction than it is horror. As always, Huston's distain for convention in both theme and structure results in a style as distinctive as Cormac McCarthy - trademark prose that Huston can claim indisputably as his own.

This is pop fiction at its creative peak - fresh and satirical and stuffed full of allegory and nuance - an in-your-face slap at convention and protocol that will most certainly launch a pack of new stylists in its wake. While Huston's blunt violence and his sparse, unapologetic passages are not for anyone, the iconoclastic Huston will continue to hold down my number one spot of contemporary crime writers.

I'm not normally a fan of vampire novels but I have been enjoying this series about Joe Pitt. I think the reason I like this series has little to do with vampires. I just like smart, dark, brutally violent novels where there are no real good guys. Joe Pitt is no hero. At one point in the novel he is telling another character about his discovery of a facility where hundreds of women are being held against their will. The character tries to reassure Joe that there was nothing he could have done to save them, to which Joe replies that it never even occurred to him to try. I like a character who is, first and foremost, looking out for #1 and who has little or no empathy for others.

If you haven't read any of these novels (this is the fourth in a 5 part series) don't start here. You won't have a clue what is going on. You need to read them in order.

If you haven't read any of these novels before and you're trying to decide whether or not this series is up your alley - I offer the following. If you prefer novels with at least one likeable character, you probably won't like this series. The violence is of the `visceral bone crunching' variety. In the second novel, Joe bites an old lady's eyeball out. If that sounds morbidly funny to you, you'll probably like this series. If it sounds appalling and makes you cringe, you probably won't like this series. If you are in search of traditional vampires or sparkly vampires or hunky shirtless vampires, you won't find them in these novels. The vampyres in this series are the product of a virus and they definitely aren't romance material. Finally, one of the things I like about most of the entries in this series (not so much in the third one) is that they're smartly written. The second and fourth novels in particular remind me of spy novels in that the motives and ulterior motives of characters are played out in moves and counter moves and counter/counter moves. The Clans in the novel operate as microcosms of countries where The Society and The Coalition are the Super Powers and everyone has a hidden agenda.

Fans of the series may be wondering if Last Drop is worth reading. My answer is absolutely. I thought Every Last Drop was considerably better than the third novel, Half the Blood in Brooklyn, which I found disappointing. The high point in the series for me was the second novel, No Dominion. The only downside to Last Drop is that it has that `Middle Chapter' feeling. There are developments in this novel that move the story along and set things up for the final novel in the series, but it doesn't tell a complete story on its own. But that's a minor complaint. I enjoyed this novel and look forward to the final entry in the series.

The vampire element is brilliantly handled in Huston's different way, as usual, but what makes the series for me is Huston's mastery of classic hardboiled detective writing. He just gets that style so perfectly, which makes the books a blast to read. Definitely read them in order but keep in mind that the first and now fourth are the best in the series so far - i.e., this Joe Pitt book is a step up from the previous two, which were a minor step down from the first. The action in Every Last Drop makes more sense, Joe is a little less of a ping-pong ball getting knocked around without any agency of his own, and the core relationships develop in more satisfying ways than in the last couple of books. I'll defer to Colin Lindsey's nice review for the rest, although I'm not as annoyed as he is at the way the book ended - the final developments with Terry and the Enclave were more than satisfaction enough, and set up the next book in an exciting way I don't mind waiting for.

Huston continues to develop and enrich the NYC vampire underground he's created in these Joe Pitt novels with Every Last Drop. Huston's punchy style and great dialog keeps the pages turning and a perpetual smile plastered to the face of his readers. Great vampire noir fusion for anyone looking to indulge in some escapism.

Is there an end to the intrigue? Not yet. Betrayal and duplicity are the norm in this series. Hard boiled and bloody done well. Enjoy.

The four Joe Pitt novels are extraordinary examples at stylistic prose and horror noir at their best. The casual reader should be advised that "Every Last Drop" is not a good novel to begin one's sojourn in this excellent series. In fact, each subsequent novel has become murkier and more entangling than the previous entry. Huston's free style prose is sometimes hard to follow since it is dialogue in real time with no indications of "he said... she said". But stay with it---it is worth it!

Charlie Huston continues fleshing out his strangely intriguing world in which gang-like "clans" of vampires (humans who have been infected with the Vyrus) have divided Manhatten Island into territories and fiefdoms, each with its own governing structure, borders, spheres of influence, and purpose in existing. Huston effectively creates a world where vampires coexist with unknowing humans and where the sociological, psychological, and philosophical conflicts between individuals and between clans make for stunning parodies and commentaries on our lifestyles.

"Every Last Drop" continues the saga of rogue vampire PI Joe Pitt who, after the action in "Half The Blood In Brooklyn," has been ousted from his Manhatten stomping grounds and is now biding time in the wastelands of the Bronx where he has some heavy duty encounters with some old (and new) enemies that leave him damaged in more ways than one. Unlikely as it is, Dexter Predo "rescues" him and offers him a new spot in the Manhatten elite if he will infiltrate the new clan, Cure, to secure inside information on its search for a cure for the Vyrus.

Joe's reentry into the clannish world of Manhatten sets off a storm of events and conflicts that soon has him encountering, willingly or unwillingly, the Coalition, the Society, the Hood, and the Enclave. Joe once again plays all sides against each other, remains ever the loner, and seemingly starts a clan war to get at what he really wants...think back to the end of "Half The Blood In Brooklyn".

Peforming one of the tasks necessary to keep him alive (there are many in this convulted plot), Joe discovers a grimly explosive secret surrounding one of the most powerful clans--a secret so potentially explosive that the entire clan structure may go to war because of it. Joe's quest in this novel is agonizing to follow since it is accompanied by a great amount of violence, maiming, and depressing revelations. Yet, Joe is resolute through it all as he seeks an important reunion with someone from his past. I strongly recommend this effort for Huston fans but I urge first-timers to start with "Already Dead" and begin the fun trip toward "Every Last Drop."

Sometimes it feels like you're in the same room as these frighteningly powerful people, so close you can feel their pulse and smell their musk. Beyond lifelike characters, I strongly recommend this series to anyone who needs a refreshing book o keep them up at night their pulse a thundering drum in their head.

I've been putting off reading the last two books in Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series because, well, they're the last books. Joe Pitt, the unaffiliated vampire detective amid a New York City full of competing vampire clans, is such a unique character that I hate to see his story come to an end. But knowing that all good things (including fanged detectives) must come to an end, I had been steeling myself for the penultimate Pitt novel.

Huston doesn't disappoint in Every Last Drop. It's got all the things we've come to expect from Huston: rival vampire clans controlling various New York neighborhoods, an abundance of blood, Pitt's trademark wit and sarcasm. There's even a reunion of sorts with Evie, Pitt's once dying girlfriend who is now herself a vampire.

The only thing Every Last Drop doesn't have is a resolution. It's all build-up to the next and last novel. Most of the book is spent moving Pitt into position to answer a question I was amazed no one asked before: why does the Coalition, the clan that is most like a merger of the corporate world and the Mafia, always seem to have adequate supplies of blood? Maybe I've seen too many films like "Daybreakers" that covered similar territory, but I wasn't exactly surprised by the answer.

Once Pitt has the answer it brings the clans to the very brink of open warfare. And there the story ends ... with Pitt literally going underground. The only thing missing were the words "To be continued."

While each of Huston's previous novels build upon each other, there were at least complete. In Every Last Drop Huston takes all that has come before, adds a central issue and then abruptly ends the book. It's not like other novels don't have cliffhanger endings. I just wasn't expecting one from Huston. I still admire Huston's work, Heck, I'd even say that a day spent reading to worst Huston could write is better than one spent reading 90 percent of the flotsam that manages to float to the top of bestseller lists.

After the frustration of "readus interuptus" in Every Last Drop all I have to add is that Huston better have one helluva wrap up awaiting me in My Dead Body.