Kadrey, Richard: Devil Said Bang
Devil Said Bang (2012)
Written by: Richard Kadrey
Genre: Horror/Dark Fantasy
Pages: 104/399 (Hardcover)
Series: Book Four (Sandman Slim)
Why I Read It: I've been reading the Sandman Slim series since its debut. I loved the debut, and after finishing the previous book, Aloha from Hell, I was really looking forward to seeing where the story took me. Devil Said Bang was one of my pre-orders for the year too, and when it arrived, it went into the immediate TBR pile.
The premise: ganked from BN.com: Getting out of hell is just the beginning...
What do you do after you've escaped Hell, gone back, uncovered the true nature of God, and then managed to become the new Lucifer?
Well, if you're James Stark, you have to figure out how to run Hell while also trying to get back out of it . . . again. Plus there's the small matter of surviving. Because everyone in Heaven, Hell, and in between wants to be the fastest gun in the universe, and the best way to do so is to take down Lucifer, a.k.a. James Stark.
And it's not like being in L.A. is any better-a serial-killer ghost is running wild and Stark's angelic alter ego is hiding among the lost days of time with a secret cabal who can rewrite reality. Starting to care for people and life again is a real bitch for a stone-cold killer.
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. As you may have already noticed, this was a DNF for me, so I'll talk about what made me put the book aside and why.
My Rating: Not My Cup of Tea (DNF)
So yeah. I was reading along and reading along, and I kept thinking that I just wasn't interested in anything that was happening in the pages. And what's strange is that while reading, I was remembering that I'd hesitated before pre-ordering the book. I hesitated (not remembering that I was looking forward to what would happen next) because of partial urban fantasy burn-out, and the genre just isn't grabbing me like it used to. There's also the fact that over the summer, I noticed Kadrey had released an e-book novella, Devil in the Dollhouse (which is free for the Kindle right now, if anyone wants to take advantage), and I just wasn't interested enough to read THAT either. If I wasn't interested in a little story, which takes far less time to read, why did I think I'd be okay with the book?
If the book had grabbed me in the first hundred pages, I would've been all right. Sometimes you just need to remember why you enjoyed the author in the past, you know? And I did like the scenes with Wild Bill Hickok, yet there's an implication that it was Charlie Utter who, as Bill puts it on page 74, "so violently disrupted my final card game." Wait, what? The little I know (yes, you can blame Deadwood, and yes, I know that's about as accurate as believing everything you read on Wikipedia), Utter and Bill were companions and friends. Is that a typo, or is there some conspiracy over who really killed Wild Bill Hickok? Whatever the case, it ruined the author's credibility in my mind, and I'm also tired of Stark making cracks on Glocks every chance he gets. The first time, in the first book, fine, whatever. But by book four, this teeny part of his personality is getting old and repetitive.
But really, nothing happens. The stuff that does happen just doesn't interest me, and it doesn't help that this is at least the second book I've picked up this year that features the main POV character going to hell and running the show.
This doesn't mean I won't try again in the future. The series isn't over, and if I hear it truly ends with an awesome bang, I'll be happy to pick this back up and give it another go. But right now, I'm just not interested any more, and when I realized I was no longer interested, I decided to move onto something I was interested in instead.
Cover Commentary: I like the cover a lot, actually. The coloring works quite well, and I like the placement of the title. The cover is what made me realize Kadrey was coming out with another novel, so that it caught my eye means it's doing its job.
Next up: The Crown of Embers by Rae Carson