How innovative a suspense writer is Charlie Huston? So innovative that he’s pretty much crafted his own genre: horror noir. Now, maybe there are others who have combined the dark worlds of crime fiction and horror fiction before, but I don’t know of any. Huston, meanwhile, is on his second book in this sub genre, No Dominion. The novel continues the saga of Joe Pitt, first begun in Already Dead (which I admittedly didn’t read. But I plan to).

Joe is your typical noir hero: jaded, cynical, intent on alienating everyone around him, including the woman he loves. Oh, and he’s also a vampire. Or, as he says, he’s infected with the “Vyrus.” Joe acts less like a fearsome creature of the night and more like any other sad sack who hates his lot in life.

At the start of the book, Joe is running low both on money and the bags of blood he keeps in his fridge. To keep himself fed, he takes a job tracking down a new drug that’s hit the vampire community. Joe determines to find out where the drug came from and why it’s suddenly circulating and driving some members of his ilk into a frenzy resembling a bad acid trip. Like any other noir leading man, Joe’s search leads to a serious of double and triple crosses, colorful characters and bloodshed.

Huston’s previous books have included the excellent Henry Thompson series, which tracked a regular guy’s metamorphosis into a cold-blooded killer. Here, he creates a convincing world (or underworld, as it were) of quirky, morally ambiguous people. The fact that they feast on blood makes them doubly fascinating. No Dominion falters a bit toward the end, but overall, it’s a cleverly, gory, tightly wound tale that should satisfy fans of both horror and noir.

• The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
• A Dangerous Man
• Caught Stealing
• Already Dead: A Joe Pitt Novel