The Perdition Score: A Sandman
Slim Novel. By Richard Kadrey. Harper Voyager. $25.99.
Richard Kadrey writes so
well, with such irrepressible delight in profanity and unspeakable descriptions
of unspeakable creatures and events, that it is tempting to read his series of
Sandman Slim novels for the verbiage alone. In fact, that is often a good idea,
since the plots, although intricate, are mostly about James Stark (aka Sandman
Slim) smashing things, smashing into
things, being smashed by things,
getting ready to smash things, or thinking about smashing things. Not too much
of that last one, actually, since, as Stark says in The Perdition Score, “This means I have to think and be patient, my
two least favorite things.”
Fans of the character and of
Kadrey will be happy to know that there is less thinking and waiting about in
this eighth series entry than in the previous one, Killing Pretty, whose ingratiating title (or what passes for
ingratiating in Kadrey’s writing) belied a more-static-than-usual plot. Kadrey
and Stark are back on the move in The
Perdition Score, a little ditty that takes up the matter of a hyper-evil
organization called Wormwood that has its tentacles (not all of them
figurative) into all sorts of matters living and dead, using people and other
things that are living and dead or maybe a little of both. Pursuing Wormwood
involves Stark with demons (good and bad), angels (good and bad), a weird
substance called “black milk” (good and bad, bringing miraculous healing or
death), and various hangers-on in his immediate vicinity (good and bad). It
also involves kidnapped kids, the current Angel of Death (someone killed the
last one), and a whole lot of description of Los Angeles and its environs and
Hell (aka Downtown) and its environs.
L.A. example: “When I was dragged Downtown, Silver Lake was still thrift shops,
dingy little corner groceries, working-class bars, people cooking on hot plates
in garages, and low-level dope dealers. Now it’s Wi-Fi-enabled omelets and
gluten-free Vespas.” Downtown example, with the understanding that Downtown is
a lot like L.A.: “Griffith Park back
in the world is a lot of brittle scrub, annoying bushes, and thirsty trees
covering what’s essentially a big rock hemorrhoid looming over Hollywood.
…Maybe even sixty years ago some vestiges of golden-age glamour still clung to
the place, but even then it was less like romance and more like a particularly
enchanting strain of tuberculosis. …Of course, Hellion Griffith Park doesn’t
have the same stupid trees and irritating bushes as regular Griffith Park. No,
this park is more twisted, vicious, and thorny than Sleeping Beauty’s bastard
castle. There are bushes with poisonous berries that burst if you make the
slightest contact. Black, twisted trees drop rotten fruit full of venomous
centipedes the size of dachshunds.” And so on.
These marvelously pointed
descriptive passages are the greatest pleasure of reading The Perdition Score and a number of the other Sandman Slim books.
Just when you think Kadrey cannot possibly get any pithier or Stark any more
bitter, out comes: “The gathering is exactly what I was afraid of. A CIA
torture session of wine, cheese, and tony chitchat. Maybe eating Brie just
makes people stupid. I never trusted the stuff myself. Soft cheese is a
reminder that all cheese is just milk that crawled into a ditch to die, then
some lunatic came along, spread the corpse on a saltine, and invented hors
d’oeuvres. Now people pay heroin prices for stuff they could make themselves if
they only had the guts to strap a pint of whole milk to their engine blocks for
a few days. Sure it might come out a little greasy, but that’ll just shoot the
stuff through your system faster. No need to absorb any actual calories. This
is L.A., where the food is prettier than the movie stars and twice as
untouchable.” Or: “I want to find the fault line that will drop California into
the ocean and toss a nuke down there. No one on this boat, me included, will
benefit the human race by living one more day. Let’s just blow the whole
shebang into the Pacific and give Nevada a shot at some prime beachfront
property.”
And these are merely asides, short passages largely unconnected
to the actual action and activity of The
Perdition Score, which contains plenty of derring-do and a fair amount of
derring-don’t. And there are plenty of other asides, such as, “If I didn’t know
better I’d swear there was no God. But I do know better and the worst I can
truly say is that I wish he was better at his job.”
This being a Hollywood novel
and a Sandman Slim book, there are of course lots of movie references in it.
One character tells Stark to keep an eye on some people through video cameras:
“All you have to do is watch the show. I know you like movies. Pretend it’s My Dinner with André or something.”
And Stark inevitably replies, “I prefer A
Fistful of Dollars, but I get your drift.” Or, early in the book, a
bartender notices how tense Stark constantly is and says, “Your problem is
you’re all Koyaanisqatsi. You
remember that movie.” Of course Stark does – “a hippie music video ninety
minutes too long.” And when the bartender says the whole film is only 90
minutes long, Stark replies, in his best, laconic Clint Eastwood style, “Yep.” But
Kadrey takes Stark and the other characters beyond movie criticism into
existential weirdness of all types. Consider the following toast offered by one
of Stark’s friends, followed by Stark’s reply:
“May you fly, walk, swim, or
crawl for all eternity under the noses of our betters.”
“And if you can’t, at least
get your own reality show. Sasquatch
Hoarders. Or The Real Housewives of
R’lyeh.”
Yes, it helps to know your
H.P. Lovecraft to get some of the references here, and it helps to have a very dark sense of humor, albeit not
necessarily one as dark as Kadrey’s (hard to imagine having one like that). And
yet ultimately, there is a peculiarly humane side to Stark, if not quite a
human one (he is only half human, the other half being angelic, for all the
good it usually does him). Less than halfway through The Perdition Score, Stark, who, as usual, narrates the story, subjects
readers to a moment of what passes for introspection with him: “I wonder what’s
a stranger life, fighting monsters or trying to figure out how people work? One
is a lot more dangerous than the other and it sure as hell isn’t monsters.” And
that pretty much encapsulates not only Stark’s thinking and Kadrey’s but also
the appeal of The Perdition Score in
particular and the ongoing fascination of the Sandman Slim series in general
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