No Dominion by Charlie Huston: Hard-Boiled Bloodsuckers

Joe Pitt is having a hard time with his afterlife. Jobs are getting hard to come by for a vampire enforcer turned jack-of-all-trades, old allies aren't so welcoming, his HIV-positive girlfriend wants fewer secrets between them, and his blood reserve is down to a handful of pints. There are always his friends in the Enclave, but religious zealots are a lot scarier when they're infected with the Vyrus, a disease that grants strength, speed and eternal life in exchange for one hell of an allergy to sunshine. Between the various Clans, the Van Helsings and the constant fear of being held hostage to the Vyrus' insatiable appetite for blood, Joe's life is already complicated.

So begins the second book in the Joe Pitt Casebooks, No Dominion, by Charlie Huston, one of the rising stars of neo-noir crime fiction. Noir is one of those genres that looks easy but takes a great deal of skill to consistently pull off without lapsing into parody, and Huston is up to the challenge. He perfectly captures the rhythm and lexicon of classic crime fiction--think Dashiell Hammett, spiced with the angry nihilism of Andrew Vachss--and throws in the curve of vampires on the prowl without missing a beat. No Gothic overlords or puppetmasters of the sunlit world á la Blade: the vampires in Huston's world of shadows and dive bars live in vigilance, doing their best to make sure the human world not know they exist, and eke out their eternal existence on the fringe of New York society as best they can.

Huston plays with the reader's expectations while delivering exactly what the genre demands. Joe is a prototypical noir character, a tough guy who leads with his wits and his fists, insisting on going his own route. Despite this stubborn individualistic streak, Huston hints at Joe's deeper self, at his yearning to return to something greater than himself, whether it be the embrace of his former Clan, the Society, or the spiritual quest of the Enclave and its enigmatic guru, Daniel. All of Huston's characters, major and minor, hint at lives and beliefs larger than themselves on the page, which enriches the reading experience.

But who reads noir fiction for the characters? It's plot readers are after, and Huston throws Joe and acquaintances into a fast-paced one right away. Somebody's providing the new fish of the vampire world with an old vice: an addictive substance so powerful that the Clans are ready to kill its makers wholesale, if they knew who they were. When Joe's former boss offers to help him his good graces in vampire society in exchange for a little digging into the matter, Joe finds himself between an empty wallet and an emptying blood store. The deeper he digs, though, the deeper Joe's trouble becomes, and in classic noir fashion, the likelihood that Joe will see his first sunrise in thirty years becomes far more likely than he wants.

Noir fiction is often a case of, as Stephen King once put it, pouring new wine into old bottles, and Huston is a master server of such vintage. If you're not already familiar with Huston's work, grab his latest, pour yourself a couple of fingers of Scotch and settle in for the night.