Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey

Published by Harper Voyager on July 30, 2013

Kill City Blues is the fifth novel in the Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series.  Half-angel James Stark (sometimes known as Sandman Slim) is no longer Lucifer, although he still occupies Lucifer's penthouse at Chateau Marmont. Something not quite human wants to buy the Qomrama Om Ya (a weapon that kills gods) from Stark, but Stark doesn't have it. Since the Qomrama can be used to release the Angra Orn Ya (or to keep the Angra imprisoned), Stark decides finding it will be his best chance to protect humanity from an Angra invasion. The last Stark knew, the Qomrama was in the possession of a rogue angel named Aelita. His search for its current location takes him to Hell (of course), to a whole bunch of bars (naturally), and to a shopping mall called Kill City. Oddly enough, the story turns out to be a search for God (with a capital G), or at least for one of His parts, now that He's been broken into five separate entities.

The story is relatively mindless -- Sandman Slim finds a variety of ways to kill a variety of supernatural entities before they kill him -- but the prose is intelligent, as are the jokes, the snide comments about LA, and the snappy dialog. Kill City Blues works well as a tongue-in-cheek quest/adventure story. Dark humor is mixed with enough light humor to keep the tone from becoming oppressive, while periodic action scenes keep the story moving at a good pace.

Even if you've read all the Sandman Slim novels, it's difficult to keep track of all the gods, demons, angels, werewolves, zombies, vampires, ghosts, sylphs, Dark Eternals, Hellions, and other supernatural characters, not to mention Stark's friends (including a sin eating priest, a girlfriend who needs drugs to control her urge to drink the life out of people, and a guy with a malfunctioning mechanical body). Reading a Sandman Slim novel is like reading a guidebook to all the Netherworlds and spirit realms of the Earth's collected mythologies. Fortunately, Stark is the only one who really matters. He is fully endowed with personality (mostly snarky) and has enough mental anguish and moral qualms to keep a team of therapists busy for decades. The other characters exist only to contribute sideshow amusement.

Readers who don't have a sense of humor about religious beliefs (those who think it is blasphemous to portray God in non-Biblical terms) should probably avoid Kill City Blues. My favorite sentence is uttered to God (or a fraction of God) by Father Traven: "I devoted my life to you and now I see you're nothing but a ridiculous, foulmouthed little man." Talk about a crisis of faith!

I wouldn't call the novel's ending anti-climactic because it never actually reaches a climax. Kill City Blues has the feel of a book that was written to set up the next book in the series. That doesn't mean Kill City Blues is uneventful or that it tells a bad story, but the fizzling out, "to be continued" nature of the final pages is frustrating. I suppose the remedy is to wait for the next Sandman Slim novel. Fortunately, that's something I don't mind doing.

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