Jonny Numb

[Author: William D. Prystauk. Year of Publication: 2025]

The best hard-boiled writers make street-level grit and grime not just alluring, but sexy as hell. In his “Kink Noir” series, author William D. Prystauk follows the perilous, dangerous adventures of punk Private Investigator Denny Bowie as he investigates the criminal activity in New York City’s Greenwich Village and surrounding locales. Per the series moniker, fetishism of all shapes, sizes, and colors provides a strong thematic backbone to the tales being told. That said, Prystauk – drawing from his own experiences and observations within the BDSM community – resists the stereotypical Hollywood sensationalism typically attached to such subject matter. He imbues his characters with fully fleshed-out personalities and backstories, and is far too disciplined to insert them in cut-and-paste Scooby-Doo plots.

Prystauk’s standalone novels have been an interesting divergence from his Kink Noir comfort zone – I quite enjoyed his single-location horror-mystery, The Hanging Girl, and now we have his take on well-trod vampire mythos with Red Agenda.

One of my favorite aspects of the new novel is its location – trading the desolate, dying country villa of Hanging and the Kink Noir streets of New York for Philadelphia. The author’s ability to create a sense of place is solid, and, as someone who’s visited the City of Brotherly Love countless times (since I was able to drive, really), there’s an additional thrill in reconciling the real-world locales against the unfolding fictional action.

In the Noir universe, protagonists typically possess a mercenary manner that lends itself to a certain amorality (e.g., the PI who commits to a job for the payout, not the satisfaction of helping his – and it’s usually his – client). While Red Agenda is more a police procedural with a garlic-twist of horror, its hard-bitten protagonist, Detective Bobby Keagan, evidences a certain unlikability that puts him in line with many latter-day “heroes” in books, television series, and movies (think the push-pull of a Walter White or Saul Goodman). He’s got Baggage that robbed him of his childhood innocence and transformed him into an unabashed, nail-spitting hater of the so-called “fang-fuckers.”

But – despite some asides with characters that bring out his little-seen tender side – Keagan is tough to the point of being chewy, making him difficult to like.

Perhaps that’s why Prystauk turns Red Agenda into something of a buddy narrative. In a nutshell, the titular vampire-led terrorist organization is allegedly planning an assassination attempt for the President’s visit to Philly, and Keagan is – quite reluctantly – paired with Alden Rinc, a centuries-old vamp whose history and life experience has ingratiated him into politics and cemented him as a figurehead of a more tolerant and friendly strain of vampire (one who doesn’t subsist on human blood).

The yin/yang quality of Keagan and Rinc’s interactions forms a bulk of the narrative – which is more or less a several-day countdown clock to the Main Event (the brief chapters add a sense of urgency) – and their conflicting personalities lend a certain snap to the proceedings. Prystauk resists the urge to devolve into the lame humor of something out of a Lethal Weapon sequel, opting instead for a grizzled realism. The author is keenly aware of the amount of shit civil servants are made to swallow on a daily basis in the name of keeping their jobs, and empathizes with the plight of the Paranormal Crimes Unit and their life-threatening encounters with vampires, Sasquatch, and cryptids.

Shoot…I could see Red Agenda serving as the foundation for an altogether different series based on the possibilities alluded to here.

(William D. Prystauk’s novels are available in ebook and paperback at Amazon.)