Back home on Earth, Stark had been a rather ordinary guy. There, he suffered eleven years of endless torture-first as a Hellion plaything, then as a gladiator in the local arena, and then as a hitman for one of Lucifer’s generals. He was sent to Hell alive, the first living mortal ever to inhabit the place. In my opinion, in the first novel James Stark is clinically insane. If anything, the Sandman Slim series has been about the rehabilitation of a monster. It took me over a year to put enough together to begin writing, but I think that period paid off in the long run. What if he was a reluctant hitman? Someone who was forced into becoming a killer because of strange outside circumstances? That struck me as a lot more interesting and with that simple idea I started developing Stark and his world. What did “Hitman from Hell” mean? Was he a traditional mob hitman who was sent to Hell for his crimes? That sounded boring. One note read “Hitman from Hell,” while the other read “character name: Sandman Slim.” For some reason, on the day I read those notes they stuck together and something clicked. The initial novel came from two lines, each in a different notebook. But my bargain with myself stood: if Sandman Slim didn’t get a good response, I was out of the book game. I promised myself that if Sandman Slim didn’t sell, I was going to give up on books and just write the occasional short story.ĭuring this period, I went into therapy and finally got on the right meds for my depression, which made writing much easier. I was also going through a prolonged depression. All of my published books had received generally good reviews, but sold poorly. I’d published three novels and started and abandoned several more. Here’s where I was when I started writing book one:

Or, more realistically, Sandman Slim would never have existed at all.

If things had gone a little differently, Sandman Slim would have been a one-off and not a twelve-book series. In today’s Big Idea, Kadrey tells us how it all came to this, and how one faces the end of a thing both the author and readers have invested so much time and love in. It’s the end of an era: with King Bullet, New York Times Bestselling Author Richard Kadrey puts a capper on the long-running and fabulous Sandman Slim series of fantasy novels.