My Dead Body by Charlie Huston

Review by Alexius White

How can you tell when it is the end of a series? Easy, everyone dies.  Well that is not completely true. Not everyone dies in Charlie Huston’s last installment Joe Pitt series. In My Dead Body all of Joe Pitt’s bad and good decides come back to get him. Everything comes to a head in this novel.

My Dead Body is the fifth and last novel of Charlie Huston’s highly popular Joe Pitt series. The novel picks up a year after the last novel, Every Last Drop. At the end of the fourth novel Joe has successfully start a war among the vampyre clans. He has exile his self to live in the sewers of Manhattan. Like the other novels in the series, My Dead Body is told throw Joe’s viewpoint. One good eye and one good knee Joe lives in hiding trying to forget the world he left behind. However, forgetting becomes very hard to do once Chubby Freeze comes down into the sewers sinking Joe’s help.

My Dead Body takes places over a few nights and spans different areas in Manhattan. The novel brings in character readers did not see in the last novel like Chubby Freeze. Chubby is a well-spoken internet porn producer who Joe had dealings with in the other novels. However, this is the first time anything is mention about Chubby having a daughter. Joe is as surprised as the readers are. In the past novels and My Dead Body, Chubby is in the company of Dallas, a handsome young man who does movies for Chubby. Now Chubby has a daughter. Joe and I both read that wrong, I am sorry. Another return character is Hurley. To say Hurley is as dumb as a box of rocks would be insulting to the box and the rocks. Hurley is Terry Bird’s extremely burly Irish bodyguard. Hurley is old school Irish and old school vampyre. He has set values that he would not break and if you break them, he will break your neck with one hand. Joe and Hurley have come close to killing one other over the past four novels, but no matter what happened in the past Hurley is always nice and polite to Joe every time they see each other. Hurley is a professional like that. Philip Sax is still alive in this novel. Philip is a drug dealer and user who wants to be a vampyre but no one will turn him. He usually is playing both sides to see who will give the better deal or who will beat him up less. DJ Grave Digga is back in this novel. He is the leader of the Hood Clan. The Hood Clan normally conducts itself like a gang. However, in this novel DJ Grave Digga, or just Digga as Joe calls him, wants to take full advance of the war going on between the Society and the Coalition.

In the start of this novel, Joe does not want to help anyone. He just wants to be left alone until he can find a way to get back to his Evie, his ex girlfriend. Conversely, Chubby tells Joe that Evie is the one who sent him. She wants Joe to help Chubby find his daughter. The things Joe does for love. He will destroy the whole world, well at least the whole vampyre world. This novel is like watching an old retired fighter come out of retired to fight one last time. It is a great ending to the series. Yet, the ending of the novel does leave room for one more novel. I hope that there is be one more. The novel gets four stars for me.