Kamikaze L’Amour

A Novel of the Future

By: Richard Kadrey

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

A science-fiction novel about love and experimental music, technology and rain forests, humanity and the United States. Rock sensation Ryder fakes his own suicide and journeys to the rain forest. But San Francisco is not what he expected.

©1995 Richard Kadrey (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

My favorite Richard Kadrey book so far

I loved this book. I listened to it several times, rewinding and replaying. I was introduced Kadrey’s books via the Sandman Slim series which I binged on during the last few months of the Covid lock down. But this I read after I was vaccinated and it seemed to fit with the feeling of freedom.

When I was young in my 20s I experimented with the creation of unique sound patches that used the ordinary music of life, a car starting, a Pepsi bottle hissing as it’s opened, night song from Appalachia where my people are from, a back hoe digging the sand out where the creek got backed up, and so on.

I found that if I sampled a sound well enough and then clipped out just the right part of the waveform, looped and smoothed over the place where it joined mouth to tail, if I could get all the techie-weirdness to work out, then every now and then what was left could be poured into a keyboard controller, and played melodically.

I wasn’t especially good at it. The hardware was glitchy, and I didn’t have the money to acquire the good stuff. But sometimes I’d get it to play tones of such wholeness and beauty that it filled the empty spaces between the atoms.

That was more than 30 years ago. Reading this book brought back a glimpse of that time, hopefully I’ll get to revisit in another life.

Kadrey at His Future-Primitive Best

This novel is cyber-punk at its primitive vortex: The Amazon Jungle is growing North, consuming California. San Francisco is the last bastion of civilization. A famous rock star has faked his own death and is hiding in the City, where he meets a waitress, who believes she's calling the jungle North with its song.

Meanwhile, sinister forces try to coax Mr. Rock God back into the spotlight—but to what end?

Kadrey's work is entirely original. As he writes in the book —"Like alley cats and razor blades at a million decibals over a tense candomblé backbeat."

His story, the heart of the Kamikaze, finds the emotional core of future dystopia.

Kevin T. Collins does an admirable job keeping up the whirlwind story.

A different kind of Post Apocalypse

If you like the cyber-punk fiction this is a book to check out. It has many of the usual cyber-punk tropes; high tech, lowlife, amphetamines in blister packs, humanity surviving on after some catastrophe etc. but, it also has a unique earth reclaiming what's hers, man vs nature perspective that makes this story all the more intriguing.
Fair warning ; it starts out a little slow, but builds wonderfully to a satisfying conclusion. Check this one out. You won't regret it.