The Grand Dark

"Richard Kadrey is another one of those great, longstanding writers who found his milieu with noir. He started off as one of the OG cyberpunk writers. He has a short story in Bruce Sterling’s Mirror Shades , which is the seminal, original, genre-defining anthology of cyberpunk published in the mid-80s. He wrote a great cyberpunk novel in the 80s called Metrophage , which I read as a teenager. I actually wrote the introduction for its reissue. Richard’s career really took off with a book called Sandman Slim , which is a noir novel. A man who’s a sorcerer is part of a magic circle in contemporary Los Angeles. The other magicians murder him, and they send him to hell, where he becomes a gladiator and pit fights for the demons. In so doing, he wins the favor of a demon prince and then steals an artifact that allows him to return to Earth and take his revenge. That was the first volume of 13, and the series is now complete. Sandman Slim, the monster who kills monsters, the unkillable man, comes back from hell and faces a series of escalating existential challenges. He saves Los Angeles, and then he saves America, and then he saves the Earth, and then he saves the solar system, and then he saves our reality, and then he saves heaven, and then he saves hell—over and over again, in this very noir way. It’s a great series of journeys. It’s in hell, it’s in heaven, it’s in limbo, it’s in other dimensions, it’s in Los Angeles, it’s all over. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As he was closing in on the end of this, Kadrey must have wanted a palate cleanser. He wanted to catch his breath before he brought it in for a landing, and he wrote The Grand Dark . This is a very fucking weird book. It’s set in an alternate interwar period. It’s an analogy to Weimar , so think of Berlin in the ’20s. War is on the horizon. The city is full of mutilated veterans, many of whom, for complex reasons related to chemical weapons, have lost some or all of their face and go about wearing tin prostheses. The city is moving from a loose post-war liberalism into a drums-of-war-beating authoritarianism. It’s a murder story about a guy who is a down-and-outer, who ends up trying to investigate a murder because he is part of the underclass to whom no one in the temporal authorities wants to pay attention. Kadrey’s noir is Vantablack. It’s what made him such a great cyberpunk writer. He, alone among the cyberpunks, was an actual punk. That’s not quite true, because John Shirley wrote music for the Blue Oyster Cult, but Kadrey was a reformed car thief who’d done time in juvie. His noir is pretty goddamn noir. It’s not leavened with the humor of Steve Brust. Think of a Tom Waits album that’s been dragged through the gutter, and now it skips over and over again on Tom Waits growling. That’s where we’re at with Kadrey. It’s a stunning read; it’s beautifully plotted. The setting is amazing, and it’s got some great twists."