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Friday 20 June 2014

Review: DEVIL SAID BANG

Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey
Book 4 of the Sandman Slim series
Read by MacLeod Andrews
Genre: urban fantasy
Format: hardback & audiobookAudiobook

About Devil Said Bang:
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.
Source: Info in the About Devil Said Bang was taken from GoodReads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13157246-devil-said-bang on 26/10/2013.

hellion harley
My Thoughts:
I looked for an image that would epitome my idea of a "hellion harley" that Stark rode but all I could find is this. Not quite "it", but close enough...

Richard Kadrey knows how to spin a story. That, I have to give to him. And in this book that masterful story spinning has been made blatantly obvious. For that alone this book cannot get a rating of less than 4. And for that reason also, I can forgive his slightly unorthodox way of building a story and/or plot. A new dilemma seems to crop up every 5 or so chapters, metaphorically speaking, because the book does not seem to have chapters. There is no chapter numbering. And then these dilemmas gets resolved and moves on to the next. Books usually have an over-arc-ing plot where sub-plots could fit in. But not this serial-delimma situation. I find it a little odd. It's like reading a serial comics where the dilemma gets resolved every after so many issues.

This is book four, right? So I ought to know this author's voice by now. And in a way, I think I do. However, it still surprises me every time I take a break from reading the book. I don't know what it is about the author's voice, but I needed frequent breaks from it. Otherwise this book would have flown by. As it is, it took me sometime to finish it even with the convenience of the audiobook format. Don't know. Don't really understand it, why that is so...

I think I've said it before in reviews of previous Sandman Slim books, that this series becomes addictive as you read along. I wasn't that much of a fan with the first three books. But by the end of this book, I was a well-entrenched follower. The cover art is still in need of an upgrade though. But being a fan by now, I am feeling a bit more forgiving.

Empirical Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 4.5
Character development = 5
Story itself = 5
Ending = 5
World building = 5
Cover art = 2
Pace = 2
Plot = 5
Narrator = 5
Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 cherries


Books In The Sandman Slim Series:

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