Customer Reviews

Half the Blood of Brooklyn: A Novel

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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.

Charlie Huston specializes in sick noir, and this novel is as hard-boiled as it gets. It seems there is a shortage of blood and the Vampyre clans in Manhattan don't wish to share with the outer boroughs whose Vyrus-infected members start to encroach across the bridges and tunnels.

Joe Pitt used to be a PI--his own boss--but times change and a sick friend with AIDS pushes him into becoming head of security of the renegade Society Clan. It gives him plenty of money and a steady supply of blood demanded by the Vyrus. Unfortunately, he has to cross the river into Brooklyn to find out why the natives are encroaching on the Society's turf. Plenty of danger.

The novel isn't for everyone. The plot, language and horror is far out. I, for one, was repelled by the book. If you have a taste for the macabre--and blood--maybe you won't be. One character sums up the novel in a few words: "Most people are f-ing prudes. They don't get anything. They think if something's different, that means it's like it's abnormal. Like there's such a thing as normal."

Half the Blood of Brooklyn is the third novel of Charlie Huston's with Joe Pitt. New readers, start elsewhere.

As before, the action takes place in New York and deals with vampyres infected with the "vyrus". As you start reading, you'll see some maps that divide Manhattan up into the different gang regions. New to this novel is of course, Brooklyn.

I have to say that I really did enjoy reading the first two novels. This one just felt a little flat to me. As with any Charlie Huston novel, there are no chapters, simply continuations in the story line. That takes a little bit of getting used to as you have to pick your place to stop for the night. Not a big deal. What is a big deal to me is that this book felt more disjointed. There were several times where I had to stop, back up and figure out which character was speaking. And this book also felt a little bit short with the main character. I never really got a sense of who Joe Pitt is. He's a vampire, check. He wants to be independent, check. What else does he want? Well, I didn't feel that there was much more than that. Maybe there was but it's very subtle and I was looking for a bit more.

To me, it's good, not great.

Kicking butt and taking names. After getting pushed around in the last book, Pitt does some pushing of his own. Good action. Nasty attitudes. and an ending that promises more to come. I loved it.

I'm a big fan of the Joe Pitt series. I thought the first installment, Already Dead, was fresh and cool and highly entertaining and the second installment, No Dominion, was even better - one of the most flat-out entertaining novels I've ever read. The third novel in the series however, Half the Blood in Brooklyn, is pretty good but it's quite a bit weaker than the first two efforts.

Most of the ingredients are there in Half the Blood in Brooklyn. It has the same lean edgy prose of earlier novels and Joe is still as uncompromisingly brutal as before. But somehow the novel didn't quite work for me. It opens strong and I was hooked in the beginning, thinking I was in for another wild ride but soon afterwards things started to fall flat. First off, it has that problem that so many series novels have, which is that the author tries to weave as many previous characters into the novel as possible. So Joe spends a good part of the first part of the novel hooking up with the runaway girl from the first novel and her she-male bodyguard, his AIDs afflicted girlfriend, the dude who leads a strange sect called the Enclave, the strung-out Count, the sinister head of security for the powerful Coalition clan and so on. These characters are all weaved into the plot but in a way that felt artificial to me, as if the author felt obligated to find a way to tie these characters into the story somehow.

The plot in Half the Blood in Brooklyn involves a territorial war across the river that is resulting in the smaller Brooklyn clans reaching out to form alliances with the Manhattan clans. The source of all the trouble is a radical Orthodox Jewish Clan, the Gibeah. Joe ends up on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge with Lydia to meet with a small clan called The Freaks. The Freaks are a repugnant lot and I found their antics made for some unpleasant reading. I'm not completely sure why. I like violence and gore in the right context (Joe bites an old lady's eye out in No Dominion and I was good with that) but for whatever reason the grotesque burlesque freak show and general nature of the Freaks didn't appeal to me at all.

Before you can say Vampyre Freak Show, Joe finds himself waging a one-man war against the Gibeah, the Jewish clan waging war against the other Brooklyn clans. There is much killing and pontificating before the final showdown that will leave the patriarch of the Gibeah literally in pieces, but I didn't think the introduction of this Clan added much to the series either. I found their religious rhetoric tiresome and the conflict with the group felt rushed and frenetic and strangely unsatisfying.

On a more positive note, some of the developments at the end of the novel were intriguing and despite any disappointment I might have with this novel, I am still looking forward to reading the next one. Half the Blood in Brooklyn is the weakest entry in the series so far, but it's still pretty good. I look forward to the fourth installment and hope that the quality returns to previous levels. Half the Blood in Brooklyn is not a good place to start for those new to the series. I recommend starting at the beginning. Inevitably, in reading a series, some novels are better than others. I hope that this is as low as this series gets, and that the next novel is of similar caliber to No Dominion.

I've read all the books in the Joe Pitt series (this is the latest one; the other two are Already Dead: A Novel and No Dominion: A Novel, both of which are excellent), and this is the best so far.

Before reading this one, you really ought to read the other two. Please don't start with this one, as you will lose much of the background that has led Joe Pitt to where he is.

Joe Pitt is a vampire, but not the kind you're probably used to reading about. He doesn't do sunlight, but other than that, he's different in some really basic ways. He doesn't walk around crazed with bloodlust. He doesn't attack everyone he meets and then sink his fangs into neck after neck after neck. No, he and the other vampires in this book basically walk around like you and I do, except for the aforementioned "allergy to sunlight."

If you've not read a Joe Pitt novel before, you should know that all of the books are brutal. There's bloodshed on almost every page. Joe is not a nice guy. Even when he does the "right" thing, he's obnoxious and maybe selfish and homicidal. He kills fairly easily. He jokes even when he's near death. He loves his girlfriend, but not enough to tell her the truth about who he is or to give her a choice to save herself by becoming a vampire like him (that girlfriend is dying from AIDS; Joe's blood, infected as it is with the Vyrus, which could save her or kill her, as there's no guarantee her body will be able to handle it). He has allegiances to people, but they're all driven by his own fight to survive,

The novels are done in first person, so we always get Joe's viewpoint, which is often critical of his own inadequacies, but which is also often determinedly blase. You don't see Joe get worked up about much; I guess it's tough to get worked up when you come from an abusive household, were beaten fairly regularly as a kid, were beaten almost to death by the vamp who left you to die, are constantly threatened with the possibility of spending your last moments in the sun's warm, virulent-cancer-causing embrace.

The dialogue is quick and very realistic. People speak in fragments. They stutter. Huston has a knack for making each character speak clearly in his/her own voice. Terry, the hippie vamp, speaks like a quintessential hippie (you'll feel like you're listening to someone stuck in the 60's at times); "the girl" speaks like a teenager, complete with heavy emphasis on strategically-chosen words (you can tell which by the italics); Lydia stammers and steams, and her dialogue is sometimes filled with fragments, with single words that punctuate her disgust or her contempt.

In this book, Joe is challenged by the decline of his girlfriend's health, by a lifestyle he doesn't like (he's working for Terry, basically aligned with Terry's group of vamps, and he hates being part of a group), by the awareness that someone else (Daniel) thinks he's a good choice to lead another vamp group (Joe's no leader; were it up to him, he'd hermit out somewhere, or maybe just take Evie with him, but that'd be it).

Again--bloodshed deluxe, lots of Joe-getting-beaten scenes, a healthy dose of mystery, more insight into Joe's history, and an ending that leaves you wanting the next book RIGHT NOW.

Love it!

This is just another great book in the series about Joe Pitt. I highly recommend it.

I really enjoyed Already Dead and No Dominion. I was not so very impressed with this 3rd novel. It was not nearly as engrossing and witty as the first two. Hopeful that this is just a slump "Joe" is currently in, I will try the next book--anticipating the street humor I found so entertaining previously. Don't let this be your first Charlie Huston "Joe Pitt" novel; it is rather depressing and leaves many things unresolved. The writing style is unusual, but is more difficult in this third book.