Sleepless by Charlie Huston

My review of the new sci-fi/pre-apocalypse thriller Sleepless is up at Spinetingler Magazine.

Feast your rheumy eyes HERE, dear reader.

I had some definite fucking reservations with this one, but I guess I was prepared for that.

After all, Huston himself warned the reading public it was a change of pace for him via Keith Rawson's kick-ass interview with the man over at bscreview.

Dig that shit HERE.

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston

It must be said that The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death ain’t your typical Charlie Huston novel – whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. Yeah, it has the blood (tons of the stuff), it has the kick-ass dialogue, the one-of-a-kind stream-lined prose, and it moves along like a motherfucker – but this is no doubt a major departure for Huston. Shit, I’d argue that Mystic Arts isn’t even noir.

Yeah, I fucking just said that. Deal with that shit.

That said, it certainly still kicks some major fucking ass.
Mystic Arts follows Web Goodhue, a smart-ass slacker who seems content to mooch off his best friend Chev and sleep away most of his days. He’s a dick to anybody who cares about him and an even bigger dick to those who don’t, but he’s got a reason for his attitude: a sad, nasty event has rendered him unable to deal with life.

Regardless of all this, fat-ass trauma cleaner Po Sin has decided to take him on board as an apprentice in his dirty business. First gig: cleaning up shit (literally) in a long-dead shut-in’s place. It’s a baptism by blazing fucking fire and he does a good enough job to garner a second day of work, this time cleaning up after the grisly suicide of a wealthy Malibu man with a smoking hot daughter, Soledad. Soledad and Web hit it off and soon the grieving woman asks Web to clean up after a more private, more illegal violent act…

After this encounter with the sexy femme fatale Web gets involved with deadly smuggling hicks, dumb-ass Hollywood wannabes, and rival trauma clean-up businesses – the makings of an awesome wild ride in Huston’s violent funhouse world, right?

You’d think so, but no, dear reader. It’s…different.

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death has a crazy crime plot, but it isn’t about its crazy crime plot, you dig? The book is actually more of a probing, aching character study of Web, a man forced to come to terms with the pain of his past. Yeah, I know – doesn’t sound like good old-fashioned pulpy fun, right?  Sounds like a fucking Cheever story or some shit like that (not to say Cheever wasn’t awesome but still, this is Charlie Fucking Huston we’re talking about here, the modern master of down-and-dirty noir!).

A more accurate way to describe Mystic Arts would be to compare it to the great novels of Sean Doolittle. Like Doolittle, Huston uses the crime plot as an excuse for some action to move the story forward while the real business, the real meat of the book is simply getting to the bottom of a great central character. We get deep inside Web, know his family, know his past, know his pain – know him.

Yeah, there’s hilarious line on every page and the caper shit is rock solid, but it all comes back to Web’s internal journey, his personal growth. The climax is not one of Huston’s amazing, horrifically ape-shit violent action scenes – though there is some good violence, no doubt – but Web starting to get his life in order. And Web is not a tortured killing-machine like Hank Thompson or Joe Pitt – he is a regular guy who will do anything he can not to kill someone.


So basically, don’t go into Mystic Arts expecting a violent thrill-ride with a body count to rival Predator like his previous novels. This beast is a bit more tame, a bit more humane. Shit, it may even win the guy some well-deserved new fans. But still, we’re talking tame for Charlie Fucking Huston, people. It’s like saying The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is just a vicious crazed junkyard dog instead of a fucking rabid feral dog.

EVERY LAST DROP by CHARLIE HUSTON

If you haven't been reading the Joe Pitt vampyre novels, then don't read beyond this paragraph. Instead you should go get Already Dead and prepare to burn through the rest of the Joe Pitt books (No Dominion, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, Every Last Drop) toot-fucking-sweet. And don't be fooled into thinking Charlie Huston's vampyre (sorry, it's how it's spelled in the book, probably the ONLY thing lame about the whole series) universe is similar to the other shit floating around in the toilet bowl that is current vampire media (looking at you True Blood and Twilight). Huston's books are hard-fucking-boiled noir before they are anything else, and with the latest - the penultimate in the series - Huston out does himself in the depravity department. This is rough stuff delivered smoothly via his stream-lined no-bullshit prose style.

Okay, so for those of you left, let me give you a quick rundown of where Pitt's at since we last left him in Half the Blood of Brooklyn. In the year since the previous novel, Pitt's been laying low in the wasteland that is the Bronx, a burrough where there is damn near no organization whatsoever to be had. In other words, Pitt's had to resort to more desperate ways to acquire blood. But not that desperate. He's still looking out for psychos to kill, crazed vampyres who risk exposing them all with their reckless bloody feedings. In fact, chasing just such a gang of vampyres is what brings him in contact with Lament, a sadistic child-abusing vampyre who gives his charges ridiculously sad monikers like "Low" and "Pathetic." Lament is apparently in the employ of Dexter Predo of Manhattan's Coalition and Predo makes a trip across town upon Pitt's capture. He's got a proposition for our hero.

Remember pretty little rich girl Amanda Horde and her pre-op tranny vampyre girlfriend Sela? Well, Amanda has started up her own clan called Cure and she's taking in any and all vampyres. Predo wants Pitt to be his mole within Cure and give him a heads up on how close Horde is to discovering a cure for the Vyrus, if she's going public anytime soon - stuff like that. In exchange for his service he gets his hall pass back for Manhattan. Thus Joe Pitt comes back to "civilization."

From there Pitt gets in way over his head and plays all sides against each other and generally fucks up everybody's shit. He also takes a horrifying trip up to Queens to visit the wild Mungiki gang (for those keeping score at home, Staten Island is the only borough Pitt has yet to cross into by my count).

Basically, Huston is setting everything up for the out-and-out war that we'll no doubt encounter in the final novel. There is a lot of expositional dialogue in this entry but it is generally okay because nobody does dialogue better than Huston (bold, I know, but true). There is plenty of violence and gore in Every Last Drop (an obscene amount once you get to Queens) and some fucking HUGE secrets are revealed, but it really feels like he's setting you up for the big pay-off that promises to come down upon us in the upcoming last book. More so than any of the previous three books, Every Last Drop doesn't really work without having read what came before, hence why I told you, uninformed-readers-still-reading, to stop reading after the first paragraph otherwise none of this will make any sense to you.

But I guess in another way, if you HAVE read the first three, you don't need a review to tell you to read the living shit out of this one. Thing is, because the release dates of Charlie's books got switched around, it's most likely going to be at least a year and a half before the final Pitt book comes out.

Shit.

Joe Pitt Lives!

Over at his site, www.pulpnoir.com, Charlie Huston has posted some reliably badass pages from Every Last Drop, the fourth book in his Joe Pitt series. If I wasn't dying to read it before (and I sure as shit was), now I could easily kill a dog (or torture a cat) for a copy.

The penultimate book in the vampire P.I. series is due out in September. If you haven't read any of the preceding novels, a month is more than enough time to catch up. Nothing reads faster than a Huston book. If you haven't read any of Charlie's work before, then you're missing out on some of the darkest, bloodiest, rock-and-fucking-rolling-est writing the noir genre has yet seen.

HUSTON'S HANK THOMPSON TRILOGY

Admittedly, I was late to the party on Charlie Huston. I had heard good things, heard people mention him alonside others of the new school like Jason Starr and Ken Bruen, but had never given him a chance. His first novel Caught Stealing was given to me Christmas of '06. Since pretty much all I ever want for Christmas is books, it took me a while to get around to it. Then about a year ago I picked it up...and pretty much couldn't put it down until I was finished. I caught up with Huston real quick after that.

Caught Stealing is book one of a trilogy of novels known as the Hank Thompson Trilogy. The trilogy includes Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. Basically, the books are about a hard-luck bartender and all the shit he has to go through over a few million dollars in gangster money. It starts out with some classic Hitchcock "wrong man" shennanigans and then escalates over the books to the point that he is a reluctant hitman with an addiction to painkillers and a surgically modified face.

Through all the craziness and ultra-violence (and I mean "ultra" - his graphic violence is second only to McCarthy's Blood Meridian), the beautifully terse sentences and no bullshit plotting, we have Hank Thompson, possibly the best noir hero ever written (up there with Pete Bondurant of James Ellroy's so to be completed American Underworld Trilogy).

The transformation we see Hank goes through is the key to these books. Though throughout this regular guy ends up killing an endless amount of people (in the best action scenes ever written), he still is consistently someone we root for, sympathize with. In the first book he just wants to stay alive. In the second book, he just wants to keep his parents alive. In the final installment, he is looking for some small amount of redemption, some peace.

Huston thus far has seven books widely available:

the hank thompson trilogy: CAUGHT STEALING, SIX BAD THINGS, A DANGEROUS MAN
the joe pitt casefiles: ALREADY DEAD, NO DOMINION, HALF THE BLOOD OF BROOKLYN
a standalone: THE SHOTGUN RULE

I will talk about about the Joe Pitt books later but those and SHOTGUN RULE are just as exciting as the Hank books. In case you hadn't inferred as much from my discussion of the extreme violence of these books, Charlie Huston is not for Murder She Wrote fans. Honestly, it doesn't get any more hard-boiled, more violent, more disturbing than Charlie Huston.