Butcher Bird

This week I say thank you to Butcher Bird, by Richard Kadrey, for re-releasing this book in 2017, and giving me an excuse to read something new (to me) and still appear current!

butcher bird

As mentioned, Butcher Bird is not a new book. It first came out in 2005 under the title “Blind Shrike”, which Richard Kadrey posted for free on his website. It saw a few iterations as a paperback and e-book between 2007-2015, and now here it goes again. This version has a few minor tweaks (like a reference to Donald Trump that would have made zero sense back in 2007), and there’s a little short story at the end of it. I actually didn’t know this story existed but I am a fan of Kadrey’s Sandman Slim novels. Much like those, Butcher Bird is a gritty supernatural fantasy.

Spyder spends his time smoking, drinking, and tattooing. He didn’t have a squeaky-clean life in adolescence, but has mostly managed to stay out of trouble as an adult. He runs his tattoo shop in San Francisco with his best friend and drinking pal, Lulu, who does body piercing. When he inadvertently pisses off a demon behind a bar, a blind woman saves him by impaling the demon with a sword. But the next morning, Spyder realizes the demon attack has an unfortunate side effect: he now sees all the supernatural elements overlaid on the reality he knew. With his life in turmoil (turns out the now-dead demon has friends who set out to make life for Spyder as uncomfortable as possible), life as he knows it will never be the same.

Spyder tracks down the blind woman with the sword, hoping she can turn off his new supernatural vision or, at the least, help him learn to cope with it. But the blind woman, the Butcher Bird (aka Shrike), is a supernatural assassin-and-mercenary-for-hire, and she needs his help. She is looking for a book, but it’s not just business for her: the book contains secrets which may help her find and save her father, who is – literally – wasting away while his mind is held captive in hell. The book also might contain the spell to remove Spyder’s newly-acquired vision.

The only problem is that the book is in hell. By all accounts, Satan has it in his personal collection of goodies. The likelihood of anyone finding their way into hell, sneaking through without being caught, stealing a book from Satan, and then getting it (and themselves) out of hell without a problem . . . well, I’m sure you can imagine that’s probably not very likely. But it just so happens that Spyder’s ex-girlfriend was studying medieval Christianity and he read most of her textbooks, many of which dealt with the specifics of hell. Shrike needs his knowledge to navigate hell; Spyder needs her book to remove his affliction.

And so begins a journey to the depths of hell in a search for salvation.

There are no goody-two-shoes in this book, and it should not be a surprise this is a gritty, no-nonsense, almost-noir style of writing. It’s a very different perspective on supernatural – there are multiple realms of reality, multiple creatures in each realm, and they don’t all follow the logic of what you think you know. For example, Satan is supposed to be the ultimate Bad Dude, but I kinda liked him in Butcher Bird. I like this, some people won’t.

But the characters are well written, well developed, and fulfill all expectations I had of them. The world is flushed out in enough detail to paint a picture of what it looks like, but none of the content feels redundant or unnecessary or excessive. It is, overall, a well written book – if this is your style.

And there are demon dachshunds! Let me tell you, we had a dachshund when I was growing up, and that dog was not all right in the head – know what I mean?

So, if you haven’t read this but you know you like other books by Richard Kadrey, give it a shot. Or if you like these kinds of books – books by Stephen Blackmoore, and maybe Coraline by Neil Gaiman come to mind – then I think you’d enjoy this. When this book first came out, I’m not sure there was a huge market for supernatural fantasy. There’s something to be said for things that are older and set the tone for how a genre developed. At just 12 years old, I’m not sure this book qualifies as “old”, but I definitely think it’s been key to defining a new genre. And that’s admirable.

Overall: 8/10

 I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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