Ballistic Kiss: A Sandman Slim Novel. By Richard Kadrey. Harper
Voyager. $28.99.
There is some really awful news regarding
Richard Kadrey’s latest Sandman Slim book. No, it is not the continuing war
between rival factions of angels with highly discordant views of Heaven. No, it
is not the sudden infestation of particularly violent ghosts. No, it is not
even the unsolved murder of a small-caliber actor and the possible involvement
in some way of a rogue angel who was last seen at an old-time porn palace.
What is awful is that the Sandman Slim series is nearing its end. This is a pending event
every bit as apocalyptic as the notion that God (Mr. Muninn in these books) may
soon decide to surrender Heaven to those favoring the “priggish wonderland”
notion of an afterlife, complete with exactly zero human souls. A world, our world, without Sandman Slim novels
is no better than – well, a priggish wonderland.
There have so far been 11½ of these vastly
over-the-top books, for which the term “urban noir” might have been invented
except for the fact that it is wholly inadequate to describe what Kadrey has
wrought: Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead,
Aloha from Hell, Devil in the Dollhouse (that’s the half book, a novelette
that is too short to be called a full-fledged novel), Devil Said Bang, Kill City Blues, The Getaway God, Killing Pretty, The
Perdition Score, The Kill Society, Hollywood Dead, and now Ballistic Kiss. There is scheduled to be
just one more, unless the forces of evil and darkness (those are the good guys)
conspire to extend the series or loop it back onto itself in some sort of
Möbius strip of causality. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good idea.
At this late point in the sequence, it
would take far too long to explain what everything is about. Kadrey can only
make passing references to what has already happened, so those already familiar
with the lives and deaths and depredations of Sandman Slim can remember at
least some of the background needed for the latest entry. Certainly Ballistic Kiss is not the place to
encounter Kadrey’s outré but oddly explicable Los Angeles for the first time.
One typical passing reference, relating to a giant and literally Hell-spawned
motorcycle, reads, “I picked it up when I was playing Lucifer and running Hell.
One hundred days of weirdness I never want to repeat in this life or any
other.” The background packed into those two sentences is enough to fill a
couple of books – which, in fact, it did. But Kadrey has neither time nor
inclination to delve into the past, since James Stark (aka Sandman Slim) has no
such desire himself, and he, after all, is the narrator of Ballistic Kiss and its predecessors.
What Kadrey does have an appetite for,
aside from the usual mayhem and destruction and paranormal messes that Stark
needs to clean up, frequently after he creates them (“I will beat a lion to
death with a shark if it tries to take a bite out of me”), are passing
references and descriptive passages that are not germane to the narrative but
that give it a character quite unmatched in whatever genre this is. For
example, early in Ballistic Kiss,
Stark freaks out when he has to do everyday-for-most-of-us, routine things,
such as going to a supermarket. He is so shaken by the experience that he just
has to get out-and-about to somewhere and do something more in keeping with his
usual predilections. However, there are (for the moment) no hellbeasts or other
forms of ultra-viciousness around for him to handle, and this creates what
passes for introspection in Stark: “I’m too restless to go home and face the
tarragon.” That is the sort of typical throwaway line that Kadrey wields
expertly to get readers more deeply involved in the Sandman Slim ethos than
they would be if the books merely contained a mixture of diabolical and angelic
viciousness and explosive revelations plus, from time to time, explosive
explosions.
Not that those are lacking. For example:
“There are a lot of different kinds of ghosts. Some are hard to tell from
regular people until they pull their heads off or vomit maggots all over you.
If those things happen you know you’re dealing with a ghost – or possibly a
parole officer.”
In fact, Ballistic Kiss lacks for none of the usual Sandman Slim drama:
Kadrey’s expertise at pacing is virtuosic, and his trademark mixture of
worlds-weary (yes, worlds-weary, not merely
world-weary) cynicism with rather endearing absurdist humor slanted toward films
and the Hollywood life is everywhere in evidence. So is some pretty neat
character development, much of it involving Stark’s former lover, Candy, who
moved on during the year in which Stark was most recently dead (see previous
books), and his new romance with Janet, a member of a cult that deliberately
seeks out near-death adventures (which Janet does when not working in the donut
shop where Stark once rescued her – see, yes, previous books). With the
possible destruction of Heaven or, worse, Los Angeles hanging in the balance,
with warring angels and murderous ghosts and misfiring magic, and with Stark
having no trouble accepting Janet as non-binary but having considerable
difficulty figuring out which pronouns to use, Ballistic Kiss moves the Sandman Slim sequence another big step
along a road that fans will surely wish would go on and on and on – but one
that, unfortunately, is supposed to dead-end (hopefully not forever-dead-end) a
mere single book in the not-too-distant future.
No comments:
Post a Comment