The Premise
In the closing pages of No Dominion, Joe Pitt made a decision about his standing amongst the various Vampyre Clans that dominate Manhattan in order to protect himself, and his girl, Evie. That decision has placed him in the middle of all the politics and power-struggles that he tried to avoid. Now he has to face the changes that threaten the balance of the clans and promise more bloodshed on all sides.
In Review
There is a common phrase bandied about the genre community that is used to characterize the talent for creating fictional places and people: world-building. While reading Half the Blood of Brooklyn, I could think of only one thing: world-breaking.
If you've made it this far in the Joe Pitt books, then you know that Charlie Huston does not write about pretty things. In his pages, people get beat, bloodied, mutilated, tortured, and killed with high frequency. The hero, Joe Pitt, takes the brunt of this punishment, and it is guaranteed that he will be forced to drag his wounded carcass through a gauntlet of trials at some point in the story. The dialog is loaded with profanity, and the stories that wrap everything up in a coherent plot deal with subjects that include child prostitution, rape, drug use, and the casual killing of innocents.
We know this. We've been here. I knew this going into the second book, and I will admit without compunction that this knowledge informed a measure of my excitement going into the third. Huston does not ginger-foot his way through violent situations; he rips them open along rough seams that we didn't know previously existed, and lets all the gore and entrails and viscera spill onto the page and stain every character therein. So there were no surprises in this installment as far as violent trauma; Huston fulfills the promise of his (I have to say it: wonderful) title.
Here is what did surprise me; what leaped up and ripped my notions of fiction apart and pierced my braincase without so much as a good afternoon: Huston does not treat his fictional world like a precious object.
I will let you dwell upon the ramifications of this statement for a moment.
And now I will repeat it: Huston does not treat his fictional world like a precious object.
This man; this writer; this self-proclaimed creator of pulp fiction - he is a world wreaker. Throughout the previous two Joe Pitt books, Huston sketched an entire world inhabited by Vampyre Clans and other nonhumans, dropping snippets of a greater Vampyre history while maneuvering Joe through the story - and I mean snippets; Huston gets the job done without killing entire forests of trees, and the results are fascinating. As evidence, I need only point to the page 216, where he casts the Twin Towers attack in the context of the Clans, and paints a mind-blowing picture in a single paragraph. That, my friends, is craft.
What does Huston do with all of this depth? He thrashes it to bloody bits. Rather than showcasing his ideas for hundreds of pages, Huston sticks with Joe Pitt and turns him lose, demonstrating a willingness to dismantle all of this history and back-story that stunned me. Here is a fecund writer who has out-plotted most others in a third of the space, and nothing he creates is too special to avoid destruction. Everything is fair game, and anything goes. When that is the score, who the hell knows what's coming?
Huston does, there is no question about it. He has guided Pitt through a complicated world, taught him a few things about himself, and left the man no choice but to head for terra incognita and arm himself for the coming disintegration. Like the close of No Dominion, this one gave me chills and made me feel the 365 days that lie between me and the next book in my gut. Nothing I am reading now - and nothing, I suspect, I will be reading in the next 364 days - gets under my skin like the Pitt books. Huston, for all of his modesty, is onto something, and I look forward to seeing where all of this goes.
12/24/07
