Editor’s note: In the time we have been looking at the offices/work spaces of authors, we have seen some interesting stuff. Some very plain, some chocked full of this and that. But I don’t think anything is quite like what we have today. Richard Kadrey, author of the Sandman Slim novels, has been kind enough to give us a glimpse into his own rather unique pad.
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I’ll admit it. My office is complete chaos. But I like it that way. I’m one of those people who loses track of everything the moment I try to make my space clean and logical. I think I write that way too. I have a million ideas floating around in the clutter of my brain, and they’re constantly bouncing off each other. Ideas begin to combine in odd ways. I stumble across weird juxtapositions of images, things I would never have planned. Sandman Slim started that way, as two quick scrawled entries in a couple of notebooks. “Hitman from Hell” was one. “Character name: Sandman Slim” was another. A still from an old movie gave me Stark’s look and that was just enough that I could begin to flesh out the character. (No. I won’t tell you who was in the photo or what movie it was from or what Stark looks like. Everyone should feel free to invent their own Stark.)
A 3D printed skull that holds down random papers on my desk.
A copy of the Kronos device from Guillermo del Toro’s first movie.
A Ben Templesmith print that I need to get framed.
A reproduction of an old Grand Guignol poster, inspiration for a novel I want to in the next year or two.
A walking stick made from an eight ball mounted on half a cue stick. Made for me by a friend back east.
The four Hellraiser figures that guard my poster for the Jorodowsky film version of Dune that was never made.
A Cthulhu amulet from the film Dark Waters by Mariano Baino.
A couple of photos a friend took of William Burroughs in Portland during the filming of Drugstore Cowboy.
A prototype bust of Arzach, a character created by Moebius. I don’t think they produced any more of these. It’s survived several earthquakes.
A monkey skull I brought in Durbar Square in Kathmandu many years ago.
Richard Kadrey is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. He is the author of dozens of stories, plus ten novels, including Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, Aloha from Hell, Devil Said Bang, Kill City Blues, Metrophage and Butcher Bird. His Wired magazine cover story, Carbon Copy, was made into one of the worst movies of 2001. It starred Bridget Fonda. Sorry, Bridget.
He has been immortalized as an action figure. “Kadray [sic]: The Invincible Wizard” was a villain in an episode of the Blackstar animated TV series.
Kadrey created and wrote the Vertigo comics mini-series ACCELERATE, which was illustrated by the Pander Brothers. He plans to do more comic work in the near future. He has written and spoken about art, culture and technology for Wired, The San Francisco Chronicle, Discovery Online, The Site, SXSW and Wired For Sex on the G4 cable network. Richard has no qualifications for anything he does.
Killing Pretty, the seventh book in the Sandman Slim series, will be released on Tuesday.
