Every Last Drop: A Novel
by Charlie Huston
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charlie HustonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-30
ISBN: 0345495888
Number of pages: 252
Publisher: Del Rey
Book Reviews of Every Last Drop: A Novel
Book Review: A Sanguinary Experience
Summary: 4 Stars
Let me first say that I love the works of Charlie Huston. All of his books I have read until now have been five star, rock-n-roll, pull-no-punches, burn the barn down, extraordinary works. His Caught Stealing: A Novel trilogy is one of my favorite series, and his Joe Pitt vampire stories, of which this is the fourth, are howlingly good. Yet I had a reservation about this latest book which I'll explain in just a sec.
For those of you running across this series for the first time, do yourself a favor and get the first book in this series, Already Dead: A Novel, and start reading from the beginning. This is a darkly lyrical, powerfully told story of vampires in NYC, but unlike any vampire story you've read before. In Huston's world, vampires mostly lead lives of quiet desperation, drink whiskeys with a beer back, smoke cheap cigarettes, scrabble to pay the rent, and have to contend with a dangerous addiction to blood. Gotta have it, or you will die. However, you just can't start knocking people off or the boys in blue will catch wise and then it's genocide for vampires time. To protect their existence, the vampires have formed into clans who divide up Manhattan and police themselves ruthlessly and contend with other clans much like rival gangs. Huston's vampires are not romantic figures nor are they any more horrific than humans. They were once ordinary people struggling to get by and now they're the same people, with a need for blood, struggling to get by. The protagonist, Joe Pitt, is a big tough guy, living without clan membership, struggling to get by in the cracks of vampire and human society, working gigs as a bouncer or sometimes doing investigative jobs for some of the vampire clans. Huston's works are filled with many memorable characters just as real life is. There are transvestite, hippie, financial mafia, and gay and lesbian rights vampires in these noirish tales with more to do with crime fiction than horror.
For those of you who have read the first three books and are just checking the reviews of this one before purchasing, c'mon, who are you kidding? You're going to buy this book and read it regardless of what anyone says here because you already know this series is more addictive than blood. In this fourth installment, Joe is living in the hinterlands of the Bronx and not enjoying himself so much when he is captured and mutilated by an old enemy. "Rescued" by Predo, another old enemy and ordered back to Manhattan to spy on old friends. The story is engaging, violent, noirish and fun, just like the first three tales. The story rockets forward with Joe, ever the spoiler, precipitating what looks like will be an all out war between the Society, the Coalition, the Enclave, and The Cure (a brand new vampire clan). And there the story stops, which is my peeve with this book. We are left hanging with no resolution of the big conflict set up in the first 250 pages. Huston has always written brilliant tales that you leave with a satisfying conclusion to the crises created in the novel, even if there is always room to create another crisis for the next novel. He doesn't do that here, and this book feels like the first half of a book as opposed to a whole book in and of itself, and I was disappointed that the story just stopped with no resolution. I didn't like being set up for fireworks and then finding I will have to wait I don't know how many months for a resolution. So while this is a great story, it is only half the story. Therefore I am awarding four stars for the first time to a Huston novel. Normally I would counsel people to grab Huston's books as fast as they can get their hands on them, but this time my advice is to wait to read this one until the next one comes out and them read them together. Then again, I've never been one for delayed gratification, so if you don't mind half now, then half later, go ahead, this is still the darkly enjoyable Pitt series in fine form.
Summary of Every Last Drop: A Novel
?[Charlie Huston?s] action scenes are unparalleled in crime fiction and his dialogue is so hip and dead-on that Elmore Leonard should be getting nervous.??Publishers Weekly (starred review), on Half the Blood of Brooklyn
It?s like this: a series of bullet-riddled bad breaks has seen rogue Vampyre and terminal tough guy Joe Pitt go from PI for hire to Clan-connected enforcer to dead man walking in a New York minute. And after burning all his bridges, the only one left to cross leads to the Bronx, where Joe?s brass knuckles and straight razor can?t keep him from running afoul of a sadistic old bloodsucker with a bad bark and a worse bite. Even if every Clan in Manhattan is hollering for Joe?s head on a stick, it?s got to be better than trying to survive in the outer-borough wilderness.
So it?s a no-brainer when Clan boss Dexter Predo comes looking to make a deal. All Joe has to do to win back breathing privileges on his old turf is infiltrate an upstart Clan whose plan to cure the Vyrus could expose the secret Vampyre world to mortal eyes and set off a panic-driven massacre. Not cool. But Joe?s all over it. To save the Undead future, he just has to wade neck-deep through all the archenemies, former friends, and assorted heavy hitters he?s crossed in the past. No sweat? Maybe not, but definitely more blood than he?s ever seen or hungered for. And maybe even some tears?over the horror and heartbreaking truth about the evil men do no matter who or what they are.
Praise for Charlie Huston and his Joe Pitt novels
?In conceiving his world (a New York City divided by vampire clans, each with different reasons to hate Pitt), Huston gives a fading genre a fresh afterlife. [Grade:] A.?
?Entertainment Weekly
?[Huston] creates a world that is at once supernatural and totally familiar, imaginative, and utterly convincing.?
?The Philadelphia Inquirer
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