Sandman Slim, the only half-man, half-angel who has been and returned from Hell without first dying, knows that a war between Hell and Heaven is only a matter of time. With Lucifer having had a change of heart and abandoned Hell to return to Heaven, the man Sandman hates most has moved in to fill in the power gap. When he returned the favour to Mason, the man who originally sent him to Hell, he created a situation that would only get worse, but living in L.A. Sandman has more corporeal concerns, when he gets dragged into looking for a runaway kid, a victim of an exorcism gone wrong...

Aloha from Hell (438 pages) is the third book in the Sandman Slim series of books, written by Richard Kadrey. Over the course of the previous books Kadrey has built up a rich universe in which to play in, a universe which contains angels, vampires, zombies and gods and of course our antihero Stark aka Sandman Slim, half-angel, Lucifer’s enforcer and responsible for the genocide of the zombies.

Over the course of the three books Stark has been on a journey which started as a desire for revenge on Mason, not only for sending his to hell, where he was forced to fight for his life, but also for killing his girlfriend. His revenge did not go as planned, not only did it not give him closure over her death, but having put Mason in Hell he only made him stronger.

Not that Stark has been sitting on his arse. He still runs the video store and along the way has picked up a strange sort of family in Candy, his current squeeze, Kasabian, a head on a skateboard, Vidocq, an alchemist and others. With Lucifer gone, he takes on more mundane jobs - this time around a lost kid, but then this is a Sandman Slim book and what starts out as a routine inquiry soon blossoms into events of a cosmic significance.

The books are an antithesis of the cutesy Twilight genre of supernatural tales; they are crude, irreverent and funny. The characters are raw, swearing and cursing their way through a cosmic war. The book sees Stark having to head back to Hell to stop Mason and rescue Alice, two characters that have lurked in the background since the series beginning.

Having burned through the Garden of Eden, Kadrey’s version of Hell is a Lynchian version of L.A. itself, for the first time the readers get a good look at a version of Hell as Stark traverses its streets with Jack the Ripper as his guide. The book takes Stark to his inevitable and satisfying end. Thankfully having the next book to read I already know that Kadrey hasn’t painted himself into a corner he can’t get out of.

As the series has progressed I’ve enjoyed them more. Stark is a bad tempered Phillip Marlow type character, this noire impression is further enhanced with the book being written in the first person. If the book has a fault it’s that Stark doesn’t really progress and change as a character, but then the book relies on you enjoying the central character and any significant change might just ruin this.

Don’t worry if you haven’t picked up the previous two volumes, Aloha works just as well as a standalone novel.

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Charles Packer