Sandman Slim’s final adventure

King Bullet brings in Richard Kadrey’s masterpiece for a hell of a landing.

It’s been more than a decade since Richard Kadrey blew the roof off supernatural horror with his hardboiled SANDMAN SLIM, the tale of an LA magician whose coven sends him to hell, who returns to wreak bloody revenge.

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/07/24/kadreys-sandman-slim-a-hard-boiled-revenge-novel-from-hell/

As impressive as that breakout was, Kadrey has only gone from strength to strength, publishing ten more volumes in the series that took James Stark — Sandman Slim’s birth name — through a series of ever-escalating supernatural challenges.

These sequels didn’t just demonstrate Kadrey’s incredible, deep knowledge of esoterica, which he mined relentlessly to fill in a rich, fresh multiverse that blended deep lore with contemporary themes.

They also turned Stark into more than a hardboiled antihero, going to character development places that classic noir never went — Philip Marlowe is the same reactionary asshole in The Big Sleep as he is in Playback.

Though Kadrey’s voice had more in common with Chandler’s bone-dry delivery and spectacular violence, his handling of Stark is closer to the way that MacDonald handled Travis McGee, humanizing him, having him grow.

Last year, Kadrey published BALLISTIC KISS, the next-to-last volume in the Sandman Slim series — a book that manages to be both a hard-driving pulp noir story…and a surprisingly touching story about depression and anxiety.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/25/anxietypunk/#bk

After all, what demon could Kadrey throw at Stark than the hosts of hell that he’d defeated in earlier volumes? Why, Stark himself.

Today, Harpercollins publishes KING BULLET, the twelfth volume and grand finale in the Sandman Slim series. After more than a decade of building the airplane in midflight, Kadrey finally takes it in for a landing.

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/king-bullet-richard-kadrey

King Bullet sees Stark at his most powerful and most vulnerable, because Stark has finally let others into his life, in ways that…