| Every Last Drop | ||||||||
| Charlie Huston | ||||||||
| Del Rey, 249 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Tammy Moore
After the events in No Dominion, Joe has been exiled the South Bronx. He's doing his best to keep a
low profile and eke out enough of a living to keep him in blood, bullets and smokes. It's not easy. He's there
on sufferance -- despite the tolerance and interest of local boss Esperanza -- and he's down to his last three
bullets. Staying out of trouble doesn't come naturally to him either.
So when Dexter Predo of the Coalition offers him a chance to go back to Manhattan, Joe takes it. Sure, Predo
wants him dead but it's not like he's the only one.
Joe is sent to spy on Manhattan's new vampire clan: the Cure. They were set up by Amanda Horde -- a broken,
brilliant, teenage millionaire with a soft spot for Pitt -- and are dedicated to finding a cure for Vyrus,
the cause and carrier of vampirism. Some vampires consider the Cure to be heretics, others, like the
Coalition, consider them a threat to the status quo. Dexter Predo wants to know what they are doing and
what they have planned for the future.
What does Joe want though?
Caught up in the treacherous web of vampire politics, with the few alliances he'd once had long since
severed, Joe sets about robbing Peter to pay Paul not to kill him. Each fragile alliance and casual betrayal
buys Joe a few more hours of life, but is that all he's after? Or is he manipulating them all to his own ends?
Not that it matters, because one thing he couldn't have planned for was being tasked to find out the
Coalition's deepest, darkest secret. Whether he succeeds or not, there's going to be a high price to pay.
This time it isn't just his own existence that Joe Pitt is putting on the line.
There's something oddly addictive about Charlie Huston's novels. I hate the structure he uses -- the
use of dashes instead of quotation marks is aesthetically unappealing and I dislike the use of present
tense -- but I admire how neatly he has taken the template of the hard-boiled detective novel and grafted
on fangs. Take away the Vyrus and Joe Pitt, of the clipped, cynical narrative and reluctant morality,
wouldn't have been out of place in the Black Mask magazine. With his stated amorality and motivations that
are hidden from the reader, Pitt reminds me of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon:
As I said earlier, I don't like some of Huston's grammatical choices, but I can't deny he has crafted a
riveting and enjoyable story. There's something quite stylised about the prose -- his dialogue tends to
sound slightly stilted on first reading but the use of rhythm and repetition is almost
hypnotic. Lyric. His treatment of violence in the novel is also interesting. Pitt frequently commits,
or has committed on him, acts of extreme violence... that are, ironically for a vampire novel, almost
bloodless. Pitt reports what has been done, rather than the reader seeing it. I think it works in the
novel since it serves to highlight Pitt's own attitude towards the violence, which is that it's business as usual.
If you enjoyed the other Joe Pitt novels then you'll enjoy this one too. If you haven't read them,
but you like hard boiled fiction, then I'd suggest starting from the first
book, Already Dead. Every Last Drop does work as a stand-alone novel, but it works better
if you understand all the allusions and the source of the grudges that dog Joe's heels.
Tammy Moore is a speculative fiction writer based in Belfast. She writes reviews for Verbal Magazine, Crime Scene NI and Green Man Review. Her first book The Even -- written by Tammy Moore and illustrated by Stephanie Law -- is to be published by Morrigan Books September 2008. |
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