Charlie Huston first garnered attention with his books Caught Stealing and Six Bad Things, featuring a potent fusion of hard-boiled noir and contemporary crime fiction. Written in first person and without traditional quotation marks around the dialogue, his books read like a demented drug dream channeled directly onto paper as he tracked the out-of-control existence of an accidental bad man (i.e., a guy who can't seem to stop bad things from happening all around him, even as he manages to survive).
In Already Dead, Huston brings that feverish noir edge to a different genre, merging the private eye of Hammett and Chandler with the graphic horror of a Stephen King in one of his gross-out gore phases. Joe Pitt is a private eye in the city that never sleeps; he roams the dark alleys of Manhattan with relative impunity. In large part that's because Joe not only knows one of the biggest secrets in the Big Apple, but he's a part of it.
Joe Pitt, you see, is a vampire in a city literally teeming with undead of various kinds. Divided by clan loyalties and viciously protective of their turf, the vampires - or Vampyres, in Huston's recounting - are literally at the top of the food chain. Stronger and faster than the ordinary humans who wander unknowingly around them, the Vampyres feed upon the unsuspecting and vie among themselves for supremacy despite the fact that they are, for all intents and purposes, "already dead."
Joe has refused proffered alliances with the various clans who rule the undead underworld of Manhattan. This makes him both vulnerable and valuable to those in power among the various camps. And it is why he finds it quite difficult to refuse the demand of the leader of the Coalition - the city's most powerful Vampyre clan - when he asks Joe to find the daughter of an ordinary citizen who has gone missing. It seems the poor little rich girl has a gothic interest in the dead - and she knows they're out there. Daddy wants Joe to find her, and the Coalition pressures him to do the job.
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