He says he became interested in the topics as a result of the 2000 election. There is also a great deal of classical and biblical scholarship behind Kadrey's characters.

'There's a lot of commentary about your basic class structure in LA,' he says.

'Is it going to be a smart vampire, or it is just going to be a dumb guy?' he asks himself, although he admits 'It's an odd balancing act.'Īnd like the great crime writers before him, the story examines more than the simple whodunit aspect of his stories. He says the secret for him is to take away the characters supernatural elements, and then work out how their personalities fit into the plot.

Kadrey has a great talent for taking what might be seen as stock characters by other writers and re-imagining them. As the story unfolds Stark runs into hoards of zombies who are appearing all over the city even as Lucifer is preparing for a biopic he's developing with a top Hollywood producer. 'Kill the Dead' opens with Stark chasing a Valley Girl vampire through a rundown Los Angeles shopping mall, which turns into a running battle which even the hardened locals can't ignore. 'It's fun to play off their assumptions and fun to play off the realities, so walking that weird line between the commentary, the reality and just nonsense you made up.' 'I can't think of any other place other than LA and New York where people have such a strong impression without having been there,' he says. And just to end any other Hogwarts thoughts, his tale is set in Los Angeles, a city with which Kadrey admits a real love/hate relationship. ''Sandman Slim'' the first novel picks up 11 years later with him escaping from Hell, and coming back to find all the people who sent him there, and killed his girlfriend while he was gone,' Kadrey continues. This arrogance leads him to ruffling the wrong sets of feathers, and Stark finds himself banished to Hell, where he earns a living (if that is the correct term for employment in Hades) as a hitman. He's like a lot of young men, he's very arrogant about it.' 'He's very powerful but he has never been to rigorous because magic has always come very naturally to him, so he is very sloppy about it. 'The character named Sandman Slim is actually a man named James Stark who describes himself as a magician, because he refuses to use the words like wizard or warlock, because he thinks those are way too Harry Potter,' says Kadrey running through the backstory. Kadrey will be in Minneapolis on Wednesday at Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore to read from 'Kill the Dead,' which is a sequel to his earlier novel 'Sandman Slim.'

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey