Hollywood Dead: A Sandman Slim Novel. By Richard Kadrey. Harper
Voyager. $26.99.
The thing about Richard Kadrey’s Sandman
Slim novels – one thing, anyway – is that they redefine the notion of
“collateral damage.” In these books, everything
is collateral, and nearly everything is damaged, and that includes James Stark
(aka Sandman Slim) himself. The physical damage, and there is a lot of it, is
almost beside the point: there is a ceaseless drumbeat of barely repressed violence
throughout the books, of which Hollywood
Dead is the tenth. And then the repression breaks down, the violence breaks
through, and lo and behold, you are a page or so further ahead and the body
count has mounted significantly.
The interesting thing is that the nearly
unending dull roar – okay, sometimes explosively loud roar – of violence takes
place in settings whose descriptions, although wholly incidental to the plot,
are a major pleasure of the story. Take the extended drive to which blindfolded
first-person narrator Stark is subjected early in Hollywood Dead, which lasts “well over an hour. In most towns that
would mean we’re halfway to Argentina, but in L.A. it means we could be
circling the block looking for parking.” That is brilliant, throwaway
scene-setting, part of the unending valentine to Los Angeles that the Sandman
Slim books are – provided you understand that the heart in this valentine is
extremely bloody and was ripped from a still-living body, as in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
And that is an apt thought, because Stark’s constant movie references are an
integral part of the narrative and another way in which Kadrey sets scenes and
limns personalities.
Calling the books first-person narratives
is actually a bit misleading, because Stark is not quite a person: he is
half-angel, and that is not a good
thing. It almost got him killed multiple times and did get him killed nearly a year before the start of Hollywood Dead, at the end of the
series’ ninth book, The Kill Society.
Kadrey is too good a writer to let a character such as Sandman Slim go – Stark
is one of the great creations in contemporary supernatural noir literature, although admittedly “literature” needs to be
definitionally stretched a bit to encompass the Sandman Slim books. So Kadrey
has him brought back by a necromancer and presented with an offer he cannot
refuse, thus creating the underlying plot of Hollywood Dead. The offer comes from a group of hyper-rich,
hyper-vicious Illuminati collectively known as Wormwood, a group so horrendous
that one of Stark’s determinations in the series has been to destroy every last
member, which he does quite efficiently at one point – but unfortunately only
in Hell, which he gets to visit now and then to refresh his store of
ultra-violence and his memories of the days when he was Lucifer. Wormwood is
still very much alive and kicking (and stomping, shooting, exploding, etc.) on
Earth, where it has emulated its namesake the worm’s ability to reproduce
through division: it has split in two, and what Stark has been brought back to
do is to prevent Wormwood II from annihilating Wormwood I and, by the way, most
of humanity.
Stark has little patience for his
employers, knowing they will definitely betray him rather than carry out their
part of the bargain by restoring his body for real: the necromancer has
reanimated him, but only temporarily, and without further intervention, he will
soon die for good and forever (yeah, right, as if Kadrey would allow that).
Anyway, another of the marvelous descriptive passages with which Kadrey’s books
abound provides a small sample of Stark’s feelings about Wormwood aspirants –
not actual Wormwood members, whom he hates far, far, far more intensely, but
the sorts of people who would like nothing better than to become Wormwood members if they had any idea of the organization’s
existence. Stark talks about neighborhoods filled with “walled compounds where
good, upstanding American families debate whether their artisanally raised
mutts deserve domestic or imported champagne with their prime rib kibble,” then
reminds himself that these “mere paupers with millions of dollars” are far less
awful than those living elsewhere in the rich precincts of L.A., in “gated
Xanadus where the toilets are gold and the trash doesn’t end up in landfills
but gets a gentle yacht journey out to the open sea, where it receives a Viking
funeral, complete with human sacrifice.” Stark is remarkably poetic for a
vicious, amoral, sort-of-immortal mass murderer.
The point, of course, is that Stark is not
only a vicious, amoral,
sort-of-immortal mass murderer. The real conflict in Hollywood Dead is not between Stark and Wormwood – that is old news
and is sure to play out in suitably grisly and convoluted fashion – but between
reanimated Stark and his pre-death self. After all, Stark was dead for nearly
12 months, and all his friends – yes, he does have them, and they keep him as
grounded as it is possible to stabilize someone like Sandman Slim – have moved
on in their lives. And Stark desperately wants to re-connect with them and with
his former self, as becomes increasingly clear as Hollywood Dead lurches ahead in what passes for narrative progress.
But Stark knows that if he does not fulfill his mission for Wormwood, or if he does fulfill it without figuring out
just how Wormwood intends to betray him, his temporary body will be gone and he
will be dead again and out of his friends’ lives even more permanently than he
was when he died before. So he holds back from re-engaging – until it turns out
that he needs help, both from some characters newly introduced in this book and
from some returnees from earlier in the series, in order to accomplish his
goals.
Stark is, in a sense, always at the mercy
of events that force him into uncomfortable situations, where the minor
discomforts of being shot, beaten, knifed, torn apart, blown up, etc., pale
before the major ones of watching harm come to those he cares about. Always
presented superficially as a super-macho, over-the-top violence purveyor, Stark
is actually just another protagonist tossed hither and thither by events, doing
his best to get through the day while preserving his body (or what is left of
it) and his soul (or what is left of that).
The fact that Stark is so completely unaware of what could be described as his
better nature is one thing that makes his narration of his misbegotten
adventures so compulsively readable. The fact that those adventures are so
outré and take place in such bizarre locales is another thing. The fact that
Kadrey is a brilliant scene-setter, apparently offhandedly and almost despite
himself, is yet another. Hollywood Dead
and the other Sandman Slim books are easily dismissible as overextended punk
cinematic noir only by people who
fail to see just how cleverly and intelligently Kadrey has created Stark’s
universe and the constellations of evil, violence, lust and faintly twinkling
beauty within it. Darn it, Kadrey is good.
And so, almost incidentally and inadvertently, is Sandman Slim.
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