| | |  | Amazon Kindle | Home » » » Sandman Slim: A Novel | | | | | | | Description: | | Supernatural fantasy has a new antihero
Life sucks, and then you die. Or, if you're James Stark, you spend eleven years in Hell as a hitman before finally escaping, only to land back in the hell-on-earth that is Los Angeles. Now Stark's back, and ready for revenge. And absolution, and maybe even love. But when his first stop saddles him with an abusive talking head, Stark discovers that the road to absolution and revenge is much longer than you'd expect, and both Heaven and Hell have their own ideas for his future. Resurrection sucks. Saving the world is worse. Darkly twisted, irreverent, and completely hilarious, Sandman Slim is the breakthrough novel by an acclaimed author. | | | Product Details: | | | Average Customer Rating:
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Average Customer Review:
 ( 210 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
63 of 66 found the following review helpful:
 Harry Dresden On CrackJul 09, 2009
By Crystal Lily
"Coriolous"
I am a big fan of Jim Butchers, Harry Dresden books. I devour them as soon as they are written.
Looks like I have another character to add to my list.
Sandman Slim is hopefully the first in a series. The character of Stark or Sandman Slim, is a magic using Hells Escapee with 11 years of gladiator fighting with demons and worse under his belt.
And now that he's back on Earth he's seriously pissed.
The plot of the book was very well paced. Kadrey has some simply hysterical similies and metaphors which are just so unexpected and refreshing. A girl storming out of a room in a rage and pounding down the stairs is referred to as "God's tiniest tyrannosaurus" These little phrases slipped effortlessly into the narrative really keep the reader on their toes and the interest level high while simultaneously staying completely in character with the first person narrative.
I would highly recommend this book to any fan of Jim Butcher and the likes of Simon Green.
I would offer the one caution that Kadrey does have an affinity for swearing...quite a bit. But it does fit the character and I think it would have read false if it was sugar coated or watered down.
All and all a very fun read!
91 of 102 found the following review helpful:
Dark, Dirty Fantasy. Loved it!Jun 12, 2009
By Kelly L. Melcher
(This review is based on an advanced readers copy)
This is a dark and dirty work of fantasy, so if you're looking for elves, look elsewhere. Stark comes across as a complete hardass, but isn't completely unsympathetic, I mean, I'd want to see some heads roll if I were sent down to Hell, alive. Sandman Slim is unapologetically a novel of brute force, cynical dark humor, and visceral fun.
My synopsis barely covers the plot, which would be more entertaining to read in the book rather than me spouting out what at this stage in the game would be spoilers. There were a few plot points I saw from almost the opening pages, which only put me off a little bit as I read. However other plot elements, like the ENTIRE ENDING, totally took me off guard. I like a book that can surprise me.
For the squeamish out there, here's your warning: If you're devoutly religious and you don't like controversy, fiction, or thumbing your nose at God, Angels, Devils, what-have-you, this is not your book. If you don't like violence, unsugarcoated gut spilling, antiheroes that make goody-two-shoes nervous and other such nastiness, steer clear. However, if you're like me at all, and you like a good adrenaline infused read, go pick this up when it comes out July 21st.
44 of 49 found the following review helpful:
A real treatOct 16, 2010
By simona bedosti
The main character in this urban fantasy book comes back from Hell to find his revenge on the people that killed his lover. He finds himself ten years older, in a dark Los Angeles haunted by demons, monsters and vampires. He is an hard boiled and humorous character, without hope but not wits.. I won't spoil your reading explaining who and what Sandman Slim is, but I recommend you not to miss this very well written book.
At the end of the book you will find an excerpt of the next one, "Kill the dead": I will surely buy it...as soon as its price decreases around $ 10. Enjoy!!
52 of 61 found the following review helpful:
 Derivative and scrambled, but a hard-boiled good time all the sameJul 02, 2009
By Anonymous
It's Constantine meets Gladiator, with a dash of Sandman, told as a Mike Hammer-style L.A. violent noir-slash-Gothic-punk hard-boiled detective action story! Or that's how I imagine the elevator pitch for the movie that this book seems calculated to set up, like a nearly four-hundred-page screenplay treatment. Stark/Slim, the narrator, is a quintessentially badass ex-Hellion pit fighter, back on Earth to revenge his emo girlfriend's murder, and caught up unawares in a plot to... well, do something or other that's epically, cosmologically bad. This is every bit as garbled a novel as it sounds, full of set-pieces strung together by no reasonable explanation or narrative plausibility, and strung together by over-talky bits of exposition that seem more concerned with establishing its kooky cosmology for sequel-setup purposes than with telling a single organized story. And some of the pleasure of following along on its wild ride is starkly diminished by the failure to establish rules for the magic, or for the novel's world, that make consistent sense of it; one feels at times like one is playing along with a clever five-year-old who deals a new hand of cards whenever it suits his momentary purposes.
All the same, there's plenty of fun to be had here -- the book is a great quick, escapist read full of all-out-of-bubblegum tough-guy talk and of weird-world politics, angels vs. devils vs. whoever else, doing vaguely Machiavellian scheming. If you've seen or read Hellboy and Constantine and their ilk there is not going to be much surprise here, but there is a certain more-of-the-same pleasure to it, which is no bad thing; and any reader will end up hoping they can get Ron Perlman to take the role.
15 of 16 found the following review helpful:
 Great set up...mediocre deliveryJul 26, 2011
By eShu
"Sandman Slim" is about a young "Magician" named James Stark who's betrayed by his Coven and sent to Hell. For eleven years, he serves as a Gladiator to fight other monsters for the amusement of the Inferno's demonic populace. Somehow, Stark escapes and returns to L.A., hellbent (pun intended) on revenge.
It's a good concept (though not necessarily an original one) that would have made for a good story.
Could have been a great story.
Unfortunately, it fell short on nearly all levels.
While Richard Kadrey does an admirable job contributing to the urban fantasy genre, he doesn't really add much that's new. The gritty city setting smacked of Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files", the ambiguous morality of Heaven and Hell seemed straight out of Todd McFarlane's "Spawn" series and the supernatural peek behind The Veil seemed lifted directly from White Wolf's "World of Darkness" role playing games.
But all this could have been overlooked if Kadrey at least gave us a compelling hero. For me, the weakest part of the book is the title character itself.
Stark is set up to be this slick, bad-ass anti-hero. Yet he spends far more time TELLING us why he's so dangerous than actually SHOWING us. Supposedly, he's a highly gifted magician. But we never get a demonstration of his skill because he refuses to use magic. Why give your hero traits that he never uses? Also, he's spent eleven years in mortal combat with some of the most vicious creatures in Hell. We know because he mentions this nearly ever other page. And yet he seems to repeatedly get his clock cleaned by half the characters he meets. He never seems to "Walk the talk" as it were.
I also found the first person narration a bit ill-fitting. Supposedly Stark was sent to Hell when he was nineteen. He was there for eleven years, so that would make him about thirty years old in 2009 (when the book was published). This means he would have grown up in the 80's. So why does he ruminate like a hard-boiled 1930's detective? Why doesn't he use the slang and language of a kid from the MTV Generation? This was, for me, the most distracting aspect of the book. Don't get me wrong...Kadrey goes a great job writing a film-noir-ish book. It just seemed incongruous given the hero's backstory.
Finally, there's the mystery of the novel's title. It refers, obviously, to Jim Stark. But the reader is never told why. About half-way through the book, a random character pops up and starts calling Stark "Sandman Slim". Soon everyone, including Stark himself, starts using is as if it has tremendous weight and significance. But that significance...whatever it may be...is never explained to the reader.
"Sandman Slim" is a quick read with some interesting set pieces and occasionally brilliant noir-ish writing. Unfortunately, Kadrey's first foray into the genre is marred by too-familiar scenarios and a surprisingly lack-luster anti-hero.
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