Already Dead | ||||||||
Charlie Huston | ||||||||
Del Rey, 268 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Victoria Strauss
Also unbeknownst to ordinary New Yorkers, the city is crawling with zombies, victims of a bacterial infection that rots
their bodies from the inside and gives them an insatiable appetite for human brains. One of the jobs Joe does for the
Coalition is to exterminate zombies, whose gruesome activities shine too bright a light on the supernatural side of
life. During an especially nasty run-in with a zombie trio, he makes a disturbing discovery: there's a carrier on
the loose, something that's passing on the zombie infection. His bosses at the Coalition, angry at the police and
media attention drawn by the incident, order Joe to track down and eliminate the carrier. Later, in return for
cleaning up the mess, they demand a service: Joe is to find Amanda Horde, the missing teenage daughter of wealthy
scientist Dr. Dale Edward Horde and his alcoholic wife Marilee.
Joe doesn't want to go looking for a runaway teenager. He doesn't like dealing with humans, and is reluctant to get
mixed up in the Coalition's schemes. But it'd be a very bad idea to say no to the Coalition. Just as he fears, the
search for Amanda and the carrier draws Joe deep into a web of greed, deceit, and perversion -- a journey that will
take him to the outer edge of the Vyrus's grip on him, shift the balance of power between the Clans, and uncover an
evil beyond anything anyone, except possibly the secretive Enclave, could have imagined.
Vampires have been so thoroughly done (or overdone) that it's pretty tough to come up with a new angle. At first
glance, Already Dead looks awfully familiar. Urban vampires, viral transmission, hard-boiled PI protagonist,
pulp horror references -- been there, read that, threw away the T-shirt. Yet within a couple of chapters it's clear
that Charlie Huston has found a distinctive way to put these elements together. Joe's cocky, profane, conversational
first-person narration carries a story that's replete with hard-driving, blood-and-brains-splattering action,
but is also surprisingly introspective. Joe's a classic noir tough guy, a ruthless enforcer with a taste for
self-destruction and a soft spot for his girl, but his very human struggles with the uncertainties of his Vampyrism
add depth to his character, and his questions about the meaning of his supernatural existence, as well as his
growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of his night-bound life, have more than vampiric resonance.
The author creates an interesting Vampyre culture, with its outcast Rogues and rival gangs and over it all the
Clans, warring like city-states over sharply conflicting philosophies and agendas: the scruffy countercultural
Society, the Mafia-like Coalition with its Armani-garbed boss, the mystic Enclave, whose members believe that the
Vyrus is of supernatural origin and that, by holding themselves at the brink of starvation, they may somehow cross
over into the supernatural plane. Established vampire lore is incorporated, but in a self-referential, postmodern
sort of way -- it isn't just the author recycling the mythos, it's the characters themselves:
Victoria Strauss is a novelist, and a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel, The Awakened City, is available from HarperCollins Eos. For more information, visit her website. |
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