Review: Sandman Slim - Richard Kadrey

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will.

New York has short con cannibals and sewer gators. Chicago is all snowbound yetis and the ghosts of a million angry steers with horns like jackhammers. Texas is criss-crossed with ghost railroads that kidnap demon-possessed Lolitas to play strip Russian roulette with six shells in the chamber.

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance cameras and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam away from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

Synopsis: Just how big of an asshole do you have to be for your friends to pay demons to come drag you down to hell for 11 years?

This is a really great book. For a start, it's completely insane. Wild Bill Hickok's last living descendant takes up black magic in Hollywood, only to be betrayed by his Satanist friends one night and cast into Hell. When the book opens, he's escaped after making a living there for 11 years: gladiator by day, unholy assassin by night. Which makes waking up in a North Hollywood cemetary the day after Christmas seem real fucking nothing much.

From there he acquires a bitter, depressive severed head, goes on a revenge-rampage and discovers that Homeland Security's in league with a secret society of angels, doing the Lord's work by locking up anyone with the slightest natural inclination to magic. Add in the world's weirdest brothel, an immortal French alchemist and a cult of Lovecraftian glow-in-the-dark slugs and the book simply *rockets*.

It's like Daniel Pinkwater on a bad heroin jag.

Two minor complaints:

Dear Author,

Women don't exist solely to motivate or piss off your hero. They turn out to be living, breathing people. Totally not kidding.

And two, the whole book is set in LA, yet I really didn't get an authentic LA feel from it. The LA descriptions read like someone who took a high-toned author's grant and rented a North Hollywood apartment for a month before returning to Portland. It's a visitor's LA, a shadow or a caricature, unlike the real thing in all the most important kinds of ways. Disappointing.

Still, the dialogue rocks and the plot is surprising; this is easily the best urban fantasy I've read in about four years. Highly recommended.