Even before the first chapter of his new novel The Getaway God, San Francisco author Richard Kadrey has already made dedications to William S. Burroughs, issued special thanks to dark industrial Lustmord and quoted The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Typical brooding, tough-guy stuff, right? Except that on pulp, Kadrey is anything but typical. Over the course of five Sandman Slim novels, Kadrey has created a world skewed from our own in ways usually developed in cinema and not fiction. You ever fall under the spell of dialogue from an old Dalton Trumbo noir film and think, “Why don’t people write like this anymore?” Well, Richard Kadrey does.
The much-tattooed Kadrey specializes in unlikable characters, and to no surprise, most of them are from the city of Los Angeles (we kid, we kid). The Getaway God opens in a traffic jam on Sunset, veers into a ritual group suicide in a meat locker and swiftly meets a mummified monk come suddenly alive. From there, the reader is off and running again in the adventures of James Stark, as he wrestles with invading ancient Gods and a Christmas-themed serial killer. The week of its release, Kadrey reads from and discusses The Getaway God, and one thing is sure: it’ll be anything but dull.
