Noir Vampire/Zombie

Joe Pitt #1:  Already Dead by Charlie Huston

Paranormal

This was one of my least favorite zombie/vampire books.

Joe is a vampire whose job is to find and destroy shamblers (zombies) and it's one that he's good at because he really hates those things.  Joe is kind of like a private detective working for vampyre clans (a seedy, dark-world, underbelly mob of paranormals) to stop the zombie vyrus from spreading.  Joe has been hired by uptown socialite Marilee Horde to look for her runaway daughter.  The Horde family is a scourge of corruption and despair and Joe has a little more than he can handle with this case.  Joe appears to be kind of in love with a barmaid but refuses to let the romance become physical.  That might have brought some humanity to the character.  The fact that Joe was a bit of a rogue was his only redeeming quality.

The whole mood of the book just seemed so hopeless and dark.  The book left me feeling tired and tired of reading about vampires. I just couldn't wait for it to be over.  It's hard to like a main character who doesn't like himself.  It was extremely gruesome, even for a vampire novel. This was definitely not an author I would read again. I could see this as a movie, one with a R+ rating.