I have an authorcrush on Charlie Huston.
A hardboiled thriller noir writer with a love for genre, the man can pretty much do it all. He writes comic books (currently writing Moon Knight for Marvel Comics,) vampires (his Joe Pitt casebooks are about as far away as Anne Rice as you can get and yet offers a fresh and unexpected take on the folks with fangs,) and even coming-of-age novels. (His recent award-winning novel, The Shotgun Rule, is freaking brilliant, a story of four teens in the 1980s who toy around with small-time crime and find that their choices blossom quickly into serious consequences. Think Stand By Me with guns and methamphetamine and you’ll get the picture.)
His writing style is a bit hard to digest at first – the man apparently hates quotation marks and has his characters talk in dashes with no “he exclaimed” or “she shouted” helpers, so sometimes you have to puzzle out who’s talking, but you get the hang of it after a few pages, and, really, we’re all adults here and don’t need to be spoon-fed this sort of thing. His dialogue is razor-sharp and his novels have the power of a hard slug of cheap whiskey. Start with Shotgun Rule to get a taste and go from there.
Oh: he has a pretty good blog going, too. Check it.
