Can't Look/Can't Look Away

The Shotgun Rule and Half the Blood of Brooklyn, Charlie Huston. More book reviews, because there's not much on television lately (although The Mole returns tonight). Again, I can't help feeling that Charlie Huston should be a bigger bestseller than he is. His books are incredibly readable and compelling. I'm guessing he's getting rich off the movie rights? I haven't seen anything about plans to film his books, but I wouldn't be surprised. People are always making movies from Elmore Leonard's books, and Charlie Huston's writing is very similar.

The Shotgun Rule is a stretch, for Huston, in terms of narrative voice. All of his previous novels have used a first-person narration. The Shotgun Rule uses a floating third-person limited omniscient, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. It's clear that he has a better handle on some characters than others, and sometimes makes the mistake of dumping too much into his narration. The narration works best when he's using it to tease the reader by describing a scene from different perspectives. As with all of Huston's other books, it's super-violent.


Half the Blood of Brooklyn is the third volume in Huston's noir vampire series. No, I know. Embarrassing. Huston manages to mate the two genres effectively, though. The irreverent gumshoe patter draws away from the mystical vampire hokum while the supernatural elements add a fresh element to the hard-boiled tropes.

Reading this book taught me something about noir, actually: I think it's actually a terribly masochistic genre -- think about Philip Marlow and Sam Spade taking all those conks to the head, or what Roman Polanski does to Jack Nicholson's face in Chinatown. All of the regeneration that goes on with Huston's vampire characters makes the injuries almost laughable.