My Dead Body

If literary characters have feelings, it’s a fair bet to say none of them is especially glad to end up in Charlie Huston’s books, because nobody comes out of them intact. Whether the abuse he inflicts is emotional or graphically physical, characters sitting in this imaginary green room know that they’re in for it when they hit the page. And while this is true across all of Huston’s output, things are especially tough for the denizens of his Joe Pitt casebooks, being set in a New York City lousy with vampires and all.

MY DEAD BODY is the fifth and final of these casebooks, which revolve around a conflicted vampire antihero/noir-detective type who spends most of his time sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong … and consequently getting that nose smashed to pulpy bits over and over again.

The backstory is complicated like any good noir plot should be, so newcomers should instead click the link for ALREADY DEAD — there’s only a bit of catch-me-up involved in MY DEAD BODY, and newcomers would be lost (and severely cheated of a fantastic story) by starting here.

With his life pretty well destroyed and a vampire war that he started raging in the streets above the sewers in which he lives, Pitt is pretty well resigned to living his undeath as a bloodsucking bum. But that wouldn’t be much of a book, and sure enough, an old acquaintance’s daughter (who’s carrying the child of her vampire boyfriend and could also possibly be a sort of vampire Madonna set to give birth to a savior of some sort) has gone missing, and, with dreams of salvaging his honor in the eyes of the woman he loves, Pitt takes the case.

He emerges from the sewer wanted by nearly every faction of NYC’s vampire clans, and MY DEAD BODY revisits most of the main survivors of the series’ previous installments. Plot threads get wound up and Pitt takes an ungodly amount of physical abuse, which he gets through mostly by thinking about cigarettes and a woman. He’s no Superman (no noir protagonist should be), and his bad judgment, smart mouth, unique code of honor and steady unpredictability bite him in the ass at every turn.

But Pitt never gives up, for some reason. He just keeps plugging away, despite torture or failure or heartbreak, and that persistence gives Pitt exactly what he needs to make things as right as he can.

Like its predecessors, MY DEAD BODY is unrelenting in the brutality department. For an author like Huston who seemingly relishes abusing his characters, the vampire milieu must be extremely satisfying, because vampires heal quickly, and the limits of torture are restricted only by the his imagination. Pitt once again bears the brunt of the torture here, but lots of other characters die grisly, painful deaths.

But BODY might also be the most sentimental of the Pitt books — he sees the end coming, inexorably, and even so, he pushes on, determined to see the story through. This isn’t a negative; the best noir detectives are injured romantics, and Pitt falls squarely in the cynical-but-sentimental category.

The book is also again, unfortunately, a quick and bloody read. Knowing in advance that this is the last Pitt novel makes it extremely difficult to see the pages fly by, but Huston wraps the series in his own style, and the ending he has in store for his protagonist is not to be missed. MY DEAD BODY is a superb conclusion to a powerful series that plumbed both the reaches of literary styling and the depths of grisly violence, and that puts it in a very exclusive club. —Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ALREADY DEAD by Charlie Huston
• EVERY LAST DROP by Charlie Huston
• HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN by Charlie Huston
• THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH by Charlie Huston
• NO DOMINION by Charlie Huston

Related posts:

1. Already Dead
2. Every Last Drop
3. Half the Blood of Brooklyn
4. No Dominion
5. The Body in the Gallery