Charlie Huston

Books: Fantasy | Mystery

Already Dead (2005)

Joe Pitt

Already Dead (2005)

Joe Pitt is a vampire who was a small time punk and thug before he was turned. After he was turned, he spent some time working as an enforce and, not to thrilled with that line of work either, then ended up Rogue, doing his freelance work and pretty much whatever he wants. At least until his most recent case turns on him. Now he has to find the source of the zombies in his area, and take care of that problem before it gets worse.

This was a very good noir supernatural mystery (if you don't mind the strange classification). The tone was very much that of a noir mystery, only with a vampire as the main character instead of a private detective.

The mystery was interesting, the vampires were interesting (their powers seemed to be more in-line with Joss Whedon's vampires–they can be awake during the day, and even go outside, but have to completely cover themselves to be protected from the sun.)

There was one thing, however, that I strongly disliked, and that was the way the dialog was written. Instead of using quotes, lines of dialog were offset with em dashes. First, I found this distracting because I hard a hard time initially figuring out this WAS dialog, and then separating out the dialog from Joe's thoughts. Second, because quotations marks weren't used, I quite frequently lost track of who was saying what, which was extremely frustrating.

I found the way the dialog was written to be so frustrating in fact, that I'm not sure if I want to read the second book in the series , which is really too bad, because I thoroughly enjoyed Dead Already.

If you enjoy supernatural fantasy and noir, then you will most likely want to check out Already Dead. Just be aware the formatting of the dialog may take a lot of getting used to. Will I read the next book in this series? We'll have to see. I really was annoyed by the dialog being so difficult to read, so we'll have to see how the next book was formatted, or if I'm willing to put up with the dialog.

Rating: 7/10