I’d like to start this review with an exhortation to the horror-tinged-detective-novel-written-in-the-first-person-buying public: Drop that crappy Laurell K. Hamilton book and get on the Charlie Huston train!

With ALREADY DEAD, Huston took his already keen noir skills into the supernatural realm, populating Manhattan with a patchwork of rival “vampyre” clans and doing away with quotation marks altogether. His protagonist – undead sad-sack private eye Joe Pitt – was introduced with macabre magnificence, and bloody gobbets of praise rained down from every critical balcony.

ALREADY DEAD’s sequel, NO DOMINION, proves that Charlie Huston has got a lot of gas left in his chainsaw, and his work is far from done.

The thing about well-done noir is that the hero really has to get beat to shit before he’s allowed to accomplish anything, and this is true to a brutal degree in NO DOMINION. Out of money and out of blood, Joe Pitt gets put on the trail of a new drug that’s hit the streets – one that gets vampyres high and, if misused, turns them into gibbering undead maniacs. As he unravels the drug’s trail via vampyre junkies, centuries-old secrets and sappings and beatings, Joe once again confronts the vicious truth about his race and tries to justify his place in it.

NO DOMINION is awesomely hardcore, with scenes that can be tough to read but impossible to forget: Bones are crushed, needles poked into places they shouldn’t be, and all sorts of body parts get utilized in ways never intended by nature. As the story peaks, nearly every sentence reaches for new heights of orgiastic spectacle.

That’s not to say that the book is merely gore. Joe Pitt has the makings of a classic detective: He’s got a bottomless bag of one-liners and a never-say-die-again fatalism perfectly suited to the grim proceedings. Anyone that cares about the future of horror needs to pick up NO DOMINION, and quickly. –Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston