After reading Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews, I was beginning to think that my bad luck with picking out books was finally behind me.At the same time, I figured it would be in my best interest to pick out an author that I've enjoyed since discovering them, just to be on the safe side. I'm beginning to think some malevolent force is taunting me now, because even with that choice, I'm beginning to sound cynical even to me.
Richard Kadrey is one of my all time favorite authors of Urban Fantasy (though the top three are still safe and secure) and my favorite as far as unique story-telling. Kadrey has written a number of novels, but the best, in my opinion, has been the Sandman Slim books. In the stories, the main character, James Stark, escapes from a tormented existence in hell to get revenge against the people who sent him there when he was still breathing.
Throughout the novels, we learn more and more about James: his origins, his dreams, his favorite way to kill things that piss him off. My favorite thing about these books is that while they are violent and repulsively destructive, they actually happen for a reason. James doesn't destroy everything just cause it's fun. He does it because the things that make the world go round keep crapping on him and he just wants to get by with his clothes unsoiled.
What I love about Richards writing is that he is a master at imagery,
and he uses it for purely destructive reasons. With a lot of books,
writers try to give you a good description of things that are happening.
Kadrey takes it one step further by giving some of the most mind
destroying images you can possibly imagine and forcing you mind to go
right to them. Early on in the book, Stark is giving his lackeys a
description of what he wants hell to look like, based off the movie
"Metropolis". As he's telling them about this movie, he goes one step
further by telling them the buildings look like "dragons fucking a
spaceship," and as awful as that image is, it's the first thing that
popped into my head. My own personal feelings about cussing in books is
that it should only be done to enhance a situation. James Stark cussing
is like listening to two Germans having an argument about about soccer:
it all may sound harsh, and I certainly couldn't understand any of it,
but they don't mean anything bad about it.
Devil in the Dollhouse is a short story by Kadrey, taking place in between books three and four. Stuck in Hell by Lucifer and forced to take over, Stark does his best to get by, but is forced to take up a job that even Lucifer didn't want completed. As short as the story actually is, I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but I thought it was really well written, and gave me a nice taste of the Sandman Slim world while I was waiting to read the fourth book. I wish I had enjoyed it a little bit more, because Devil Said Bang was definitely lacking.
Devil Said Bang starts up where Aloha From Hell, the third book left off, and had a good running start. Stuck as Lucifer in Hell, Stark is forced to go through some meaningless work as a glorified politician, trying to get Hell back in working order after the fight between the forces of Heaven and Hell laid it to waste. Stark is just trying to get everything in working order so that he can go back to earth to get his life back in order.
The book was great for a good half of it. My eReader (yes I use one. Bookstores aren't open 24 hours like gas stations and when I have an itch, I scratch it) says the book is 231 pages long. On page 96, the story takes a trip from "I love this book so much I want to frame it," to almost tossing a $200 piece of metal out my window and into the rain.
The first half of the book is almost entirely Stark trying to find his way out of hell, and eventually getting his wish, but as soon as it happens, there is a gigantic gap the size of an aircraft carrier to drive through where not only is Stark back in L.A., but he's also mysteriously in the middle of a job where ten different people are being talked about that I've never even heard about. People he knew before he went down to Hell are interacting as if he was out for a smoke, though over three months have passed since he was gone.
And I looked, there's no temporal dissidence (the space that exists between when an event happens and when the author writes it). It's almost as if these are two different stories, in which someone cut the end of one book and the beginning of another and tried to glue them together before anyone noticed. Think the beginning of The Goonies when the kids knock over the naked statue and glued it back on upside down. I felt like someone was pissing in my face.
Now I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt, so I'm sure in the next few days I'll start looking for a hard copy of this book, but in the meantime, this is just bad work on the part of the publisher if this is some kind of mistake, and an awful job by Kadrey if he meant for his book to be like this. There are no reunion between friends. There's no explanation to who the people are in the story, some of them very old characters, and a few I never even heard about being treated as if they were there the whole time and I was too stupid to notice. What's even worse is that I looked ahead in the book, pages 161-231 are complete copies of pages 96-160, meaning while I was charged for 231 pages, I only got 160 pages worth of a story, and even that wasn't enough to be a cohesive whole.
I will look into this further, and do a completely different review if it comes out that there was some kind of mistake, but in the meantime, I really have to say, Devil Said Bang was a drastic let down. It really makes me wish I had held out for The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks. The book would have been more expensive, and the author isn't exactly my favorite, but at least he is consistent in his writing.
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