The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey

 

I really wanted to like this novel--I've heard lots of good things about the Sandman Slim books--but this was not very good. It took like forever to get itself set up, then took its sweet time getting moving; and the putative protagonist took until the last quarter of the book, and maybe well into that, before he did anything for himself, for his own reasons, as something other than a reaction to someone else doing or saying a thing. Also, the weird fictional German dieselpunk city never really coalesced for me as a setting, and the attempts to convey Weimar Germany likewise failed to land. I'm sure Kadrey had things he was trying to say, parallels he wanted to make between the rise of Nazi Germany and current politics, but honestly read something recent by Lebuskes and get the same subtext, mostly, in a better novel.