Raising Hell with The Kill Society Author Richard Kadrey

Richard Kadrey has a new book to promote, but that doesn’t mean he’s slowing down to do it. The book, The Kill Society, is the ninth in his popular occult noir series Sandman Slim, and Kadrey is already writing book 10, plus treatments for two other books, a screenplay, and proposals for a handful of comic books — and that’s just between the stops on his tour.

As hard as it might be to believe, Kadrey still had time to talk with us about The Kill Society, Hell, and his secret to getting away with multiple decapitations.

Unbound Worlds: What can you tell us about Sandman Slim? What do the uninitiated need to know?

Richard Kadrey: It’s about a man named James Stark, who was unjustly sent to Hell. In the first book, he escapes and comes back to Earth to find the people who sent him there and killed his girlfriend. He murders a lot of people. He’s a little crazy, but he’s funny. I learned very early on that you can get away with any number of decapitations as long as they’re funny decapitations.

UW: What contributed to this aesthetic for you? Were you a horror movie guy growing up?

RK: I watched horror, science-fiction, fantasy … anything weird when I was a kid. Anything I knew other people, especially adults, didn’t want to see. That’s what I wanted. I used to write mostly science-fiction but I stumbled into fantasy writing. I don’t consider myself a horror writer. I consider myself much more a fantasy writer who does horror.

UW: The powers of Hell seems to be something you’ve returned to time and again in your work. Were you raised with a religious background, or was this just something that naturally intrigued you?

RK: A little bit of both. I’ve always been interested in belief systems. The Heaven/Hell paradigm is pretty big one that we live with in the West. That interested me, and yeah, I was brought up Catholic very young. My father died and my mother grabbed me up and switched me back to Protestant very early on. I always had those warring in my head. Then, as a teenager, I read enough of the Bible to know that it wasn’t for me.

I walked away from religion at a very early age, but I knew enough to have an opinion. Since then, I’ve been fascinated. If you read the history of the church, especially of the idea of evil, and the Devil, it’s really fascinating stuff. That got me started with the idea of playing with Hell and Lucifer. There’s a couple of good books that I recommend to people who are interested in these topics: The History of Hell by Alice Turner, and The Devil: a Biography by Peter Stafford.

UW: The new book takes readers into a strange new place: the Tenebrae.

RK: We spend most of the book in the Tenebrae, which we’ve see in bits and pieces before, but we see more now than we have in any of the other books. I wanted to start this book with Stark completely off-balance. He’s not in Hell, he’s not in Heaven, he’s not on Earth: I wanted him to be in a place he really didn’t know at a time when he’s trying to keep his identity secret. I wanted him to start on his guard in a way he hasn’t had to be before.

UW: Sometimes when you read a book or see a movie featuring a long-standing character, there’s not much tension because you know he or she is going to survive in the end. How do you keep the suspense alive in your series?

RK: I try to surprise myself. If I surprise myself when I’m writing the book then I think I can surprise the readers. If I can keep myself interested, then I think I can also do that for fans. I try to be as hard on Stark as I possibly can. There’s an old writer’s line about doing the worst that you can possibly do to a character, and I try to do that. What that is, changes in different circumstances.

UW: There has been some comparison between what goes on in the Tenebrae and the “Mad Max” films. Is this fair? Close to the mark?

RK: It’s close. I also see it as kind of a Western: a marauding band post Civil War. There were groups of ex-soldiers who wandered the landscape causing havoc wherever they went because there was nothing left for them to do. They didn’t have any property, land, or anything. They wandered around causing trouble, robbing people, and doing awful things. The Mad Max thing is there, but I was thinking of it much more in terms of a post-war Western.

UW: When you talk about Westerns, I think of The Man With No Name, a character who is often pressed into these situations.

RK: In this book, Stark is kind of a man with no name, because he is running around under a different identity, so yep, very much. He has a name, but it’s a lie. That means a lot to Stark, because his identity is very important to him — for good and bad.

UW: You draw from a lot of different genres. Who are some of your biggest influences right now, especially when it came to this book?

RK: It’s always hard for me to say when it comes to influences. It has changed so much over time. When I started out, we’re talking about William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Robert Stone. Some of the big influences on the whole Sandman Slim series are people like Jim Thompson, Richard Stark, James M. Cain.

For this particular book? I don’t know who in particular is new or changed things for me. I’ve read a lot of Cormac McCarthy in the last few years, so maybe he inspired some level of the unbridled brutality.

UW: I wanted to talk a little more about the iconography and geography of the afterlife and Hell. If you look back on old grimoires and religious writings, the authors had some very specific ideas about what happens to you when you die. It’s not always a pit of flame, either, there’s a lot more to it. How do you go about choosing what to draw from and defining your own world?

RK: It’s a patchwork of my own lies, plus reading about a lot of other belief systems. There’s a lot from Christianity, plus kabbalistic stuff, gnosticism. There are even references to Mayan and Buddhist traditions. It’s whatever I find interesting and surprising for myself. I’m trying to make the whole thing work together in a coherent way, and that comes through the fact that we’re talking about a Hell that’s based on Los Angeles, in a way.

Stark’s original vision of Hell is not the Hell he ends up with in the end. In the end, it’s another version of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is an amalgam of different peoples, different beliefs. I wanted to acknowledge that in the actual structure of Hell. That’s why you see influences from all of these different groups, plus my own fascination with them, but mainly to echo LA in the tortures and belief systems that run the place.

UW: Is The Kill Society a good spot for someone to jump in who hasn’t read the other books? What would you suggest, at a minimum, for a newcomer to read if they wanted to jump into The Kill Society as soon as possible?

RK: Well, I discovered that there’s a Sandman Slim wiki, and that surprised me, so you could go and read the wiki, but you can actually pick up the new one if you haven’t read the other books. You’re going to miss some subtleties — some of the relationships between the older characters — but it would actually hold together for you. If you didn’t want to go back all the way to the beginning, a good book to start with would be Killing Pretty. That’s the first book of the second arc of the series. That would be a good one to begin with. That’s not too far back: It’s just two books. I do think that The Kill Society stands on its own.

UW: Do you believe in Hell? Do you ever wish there was one?

RK: I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell in the literal sense. I do believe in an afterlife, but I think it has more to do with string theory than it does with Heaven and Hell. Borges has a nice quote about the idea of Heaven and Hell, and I stand by it: “May Heaven exist, even if my place is in Hell.”

I’ll go along with Borges, but in the end, I believe in string theory.

About The Kill Society:

Sandman Slim returns in this stunning, high-octane ninth thriller in the series, filled with the intense, kick-ass action and inventive fantasy that are the hallmarks of New York Times bestselling author Richard Kadrey.

Sandman Slim has been to Heaven and Hell and many places in between, but now he finds himself in an unknown land: the far, far edge of the Tenebrae, the desolate home of the lost dead. Making his way inland with nothing but his unerring instinct for trouble to guide him, he collides with a caravan of the damned on a mysterious crusade, led by the ruthless Magistrate. Alone and with no clue how to get back home, he throws in with this brutal bunch made up of human souls, Hellion deserters, rogue angels—and Father Traven.

Slim didn’t land in Tenebrae by chance. His little stunt of trying to open Heaven has set off a tsunami across the universe. Now, the afterlife is falling apart because of the ensuing warfare. And when Heaven finds out Slim is close by, the angels put a fat bounty on his head.

It’s one thing to ride with a ferocious criminal pack across the treacherous plains—it’s another to do it when everyone in the land of the dead is itching to keep you there permanently. But Slim’s not too worried. He’s been fighting cosmic forces bent on destroying Heaven, Hell, Earth, and him for years. A pack of vicious bounty hunters, vengeful angels, and dangerous enemies with friendly smiles isn’t going to stop him fixing the chaos he’s caused … one way or another.