Question: 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?
Answer: Not much of one, really. Just sort of violent and arrogant and nineteen, it turns out.
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. At the time the book begins, he's escaped after making a living there for 11 years: gladiator by day, demonic assassin by night. Which makes waking up on fire in a North Hollywood cemetery seem real nothing much.
This book is completely insane, in all the best ways.
Hell's own brutalized assassin, Sandman Slim, wakes up in his old life as plain old James Stark, broke and confused in a flaming pile of trash the day after Christmas. And it's still a distinct improvement over when he went to sleep. After 11 years serving as a living chew toy, Stark has managed to escape, and his first order of business is to find and kill his remaining mortal friends—the circle of black magicians who arranged for his incarceration and murdered his girlfriend, as well.
As the book progresses, Stark hunts and is hunted, betrays and is betrayed. His quest for vengeance becomes a mania, and leads him on a gritty, breakneck tour of L.A.'s magical underbelly. Kadrey crafts stylish and clever pockets of mythology here: the brothel of enslaved angels run for Hollywood's power elite, an existential cavern full of lost and impossible treasures guarded by a Fury in a bell jar, and a strip mall doctor whose cures are out of this world. It's like Daniel Pinkwater on a heroin jag.
Along the way, he acquires a bitter, depressive severed head with a penchant for porn, 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. And keeping L.A. safe from everyone except black magicians.
Stark is joined on his quest by Vidocq, an immortal French alchemist and sidekick/father figure, who tries to do what's best for Stark while looking out for his own interests. The clashes between those impulses are spectacular, and the real-life messiness of these conflicting motivations makes for an authentic telling. It's a nice, gritty grounding in realism that adds tension to the very much fantasy-driven plot.
Stark's other sidekick is Allegra, an "art school babe with priorities" he collects during his quest for revenge. My wording there is intentional; the book's biggest failing is that the female characters, of which there are a decent number, exist only as objects, to be evaluated in terms of their sexual attractiveness and availability. They are uniformly imperiled or assaulted (sometimes by Stark himself) so that their injuries can be avenged by one of the male characters. After a lapse in Stark's judgment gets Allegra nearly beaten to death, Stark gives her to Vidocq for safekeeping. The assumption is that Allegra requires a male protector, and from that point forward, her autonomy as a character disappears. She becomes less of a person and more of a one-dimensional source of supportive noises. For all intents and purposes, Kadrey turns her into a cheerleader. The gender dilemma is made all the more problematic by Stark's attraction to Cherry (yes, Cherry), his doctor's supernaturally homicidal receptionist. When she betrays her deeply held moral principles to come to Stark's rescue, his response is simply: "Best first date ever."
The belittling wisecrack is unfortunate, but somehow expected; an aura of comic book-type action dominates throughout, and this flippant misogyny is entirely consistent for that genre.
The book's only other failing is that Kadrey is so wrapped up in his characters and the nonstop explosive plot that the city of L.A. itself winds up neglected. This book is ultimately about L.A. the graveyard, the post-dawn detritus of too many parties and too few true friends, but Kadrey's L.A. lacks teeth. If the protagonist's going to toss a body in the La Brea Tar Pits, readers should be able to smell the stench and see the mammoth's glassy, mortified stare. And that just doesn't come across here. It might just as easily have been Berkeley, or Kalamazoo, or any other city of zombified misfits. To some extent, this correlates directly with Kadrey's deliberate evocation of a horror movie/comic book universe: the focus is squarely on the actions, a choice that necessarily backgrounds the landscape and renders it two-dimensional.
Nevertheless, the closer Stark gets to his goal, the more of his humanity falls away, and the more he returns to his underworld identity, the eponymous Sandman Slim, unkillable assassin of hellions. With no consideration of the morality involved, Stark acknowledges and embraces this transition solely because he believes it will assist him in finally getting his revenge. The naivety of that assumption makes Stark a more authentic character. He is, after all, a 19-year-old who woke up thirty. As his plans spiral out of control—he attracts the attention of a race of Lovecraftian glow-in-the-dark slugs and blows up part of Rodeo Drive, for instance—Stark's actions become more frenzied and desperate, and the consequences more dire. He makes bad choices because he's hurt and he's angry and he's greedy, and those are all valid and very human motivations, and give the story its only emotional depth.
For Kadrey to have his character hurtle in the wrong direction with such gusto is bold, and while that movement creates a believable protagonist, that's not the same thing as creating a likable one. If the plot didn't hurtle along at a breakneck pace, Stark's selfishness and arrogance might rankle. As it is, though, he's able to get away with an awful lot.
Not only is the whole book dripping with gore, but it's also packed with smart horror movie references. There's a priceless exchange between Stark and Lucifer near the end that encapsulates the whole tone of the book: Lucifer's going through a stack of horror DVDs, looking for ones to borrow, and Stark's rating them for him. It's an unusual setup, and one done with just a light enough touch to work. Lucifer's shrug, for instance, when Stark describes The Devil's Daughter as merely "disappointing." Anything more would be vulgar.
That said, this book is a definite thrill ride. A dark, sassy Molotov cocktail of Biblical allusions, horror movie references and sentences coiled tight as bullwhips. The book's a great, if quick and easily interruptible read. The characters are appealing and behave in realistic ways, even when presented with fantastic events. Above all, the plot consistently surprises; for Kadrey to have found a new niche in the over-encumbered urban fantasy genre is in itself a feat.
Audrey Homan lives in a cottage in the forests of Vermont, with her three magical back-talking rabbits, six dogs and a superhero. She's a lot like you, except she can see light through the holes in her ears.