Review: Sandman Slim

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I find I have accidentally stumbled into a run of a genre I didn’t know existed: the hardboiled theological quasi-horror fantasy novel. There’s Ian Tregellis’s Something More than Night and Brian Evenson’s Last Days, and there’s this. All three are surprisingly good – especially the Evenson – and I wonder how such a niche came to be. Something in the zeitgeist, I guess.

As with those others, I doubt I’d have picked this up if I’d known how much it depended on a conventional heaven-and-hell conception of the universe. As with those others, though, I couldn’t have counted on Kadrey’s skill to overcome such a flat background and provide an innovative and compelling take on fantasy and the hardboiled. (To be fair, Evenson is in a different class, but Tregellis and Kadrey are plenty of fun as well.)

Our protagonist, Stark, is a magician, a guy who simply has a knack for picking up power. He’s cocky, and he rubs the rest of his circle the wrong way, prompting them to banish him to hell. A decade later, after he’s survived everything the demons and fallen angels throw his way in the gladiator pits of hell, he escapes and sets out to kill the ex-friends who sent him there.

That’s an over-the-top premise, again, one I wouldn’t ordinarily trust, but Kadrey finds the perfect mix of fantasy, humor, and the hardboiled. To take an early example, Stark tracks down one enemy and, in a swoop, slices off his head. The wound isn’t fatal, though, and he keeps the head around for a while, taunting it and getting information from it. Sometimes he gives the head-in-the-closet a drag on his cigarette, sometimes he subjects it to a stream of television infomercials. And the banter is always great – Kadrey does dialogue in a big way.

There are other shots of humor here, too, including an ongoing bit about Stark’s inability to understand how the internet has emerged in the decade he’s been away, and another about his propensity for burning through whatever clothes he happens to be wearing.

Side by side with that surprisingly consistent comedy, Kadrey commits to the genre. He passes up many opportunities to get sentimental or saccharine. Stark really is “Sandman Slim,” a bogeyman of the hell-crowd. There aren’t easy answers or happy-ever-afters. He’s a creature of hell, and hell is trying to break through, and none of that is finally a joke. As he deals with it all, though, Stark never gives into convention, never plays the assigned part. It’s a hardboiled trope, but it’s one that only the good writers can manage.

Without spoiling the end, I have to acknowledge – again, it seems – my frustration with the final chapter or so. Kadrey and/or his editors must have seen he was onto something good, so he’s added a chunk that invites and sets up the sequel, eventually, says audible.com, a series of sequels. This one is plenty of fun, and I’m on board for more Kadrey, but I find it irritating that this strong novel has to be distorted in the service of what feels like marketing.

This is certainly a lot of fun, though, and I will be looking for more from Kadrey – maybe even, sigh, the next Sandman Slim.


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