Kadrey's Episodic Fiction Flat

The Everything Box - Richard Kadrey

Imagine, if you will, the angel sent to Earth after the Noahic flood with specific instructions to kill off any unauthorized survivors. Go ahead, imagine him – his name’s Qaphsiel, and this is his first big assignment (normally he’s in charge of office supplies)… and he blows it. Yep, Qaphsiel had The Everything Box in his pocket, but he lost it… “Crap!”

Four thousand years later, a career thief, nom de crime Coop, finds himself in a bit of a bind: unless he steals “a certain object” before the next new moon, he’s headed (back) to jail. It could be worse, though – the folks that have commissioned the theft are cops. Sort of – they’re from DOPS, the Department of Peculiar Science, and they’re magical, Well, some are, and some are just plain… weird. So Coop assembles his team – a Marilyn named Giselle and his best friend (who happened to snitch him into jail most recently) Morty. What’s a Marilyn? Well, accoring to the author, you just have to figure that out for yourself…

Whatever the case, Coop’s not the only one looking for the “object”: among the others are a couple of doomsday cults who worship competing demons, a crime syndicate, a mysterious stranger, and… Qaphsiel. You see, Coop’s been hired to find the box the angel lost 4000 years ago. Heaven help the Earth if someone finds it and… opens it.

Author Richard Kadrey is, apparently, best known for a series known as “Sandman Slim.” Don’t ask me, I’ve never heard of him. Whatever the case, the glowing praise heaped on The Everything Box continually compares Kadrey to Christopher Moore and Dave Barry (rather an odd triangular comparison, IMHO). I’m here to suggest that yes, Kadrey has a pretty good command of the absurdity dispenser, though he’s much closer to Moore or Matt Ruff  than to Barry -- but what would I know? I’m probably a generation older (maybe two) than Kadrey’s target audience. Kadrey, I’ve heard, cut his literary teeth writing short stories for Wired and similar outlets. I don’t argue that he’s not pretty good at the short story, but I think that The Everything Box suggests that he can’t carry off a novel. I say that because the book, like an unconscionable number of books in the age of the minuscule attention span, is more a pastiche of episodes – as if for a TV series story arc – than a single through-going plot. Yeah, it’s funny in places and a fairly inventive plot (though the wandering angel thing has been done many times before). It’s just that it reads more like a chain of short stories than a novel.

It could’ve been better. It wasn’t. Three Stars.

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